Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History

Abstract

Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.