Women & Gender Studies

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Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) is an interdisciplinary programme which aims to promote scholarship on gender issues in South Africa, and to contribute to the challenge of gender transformation in the university and in society at large.

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Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

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Risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence: Views of some male university students

Clowes, Lindsay; Lazarus, Sandy; Ratele, Kopano (Medical Research Council, Tygerberg, 2010)

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Abstract:

This article reports on a study that sought to elicit the views of male university students on risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence. The participants were 116 third-year students who participated in a final year research project in the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) Programme at the University of Western Cape (UWC). Each of the students conducted six semistructured face to face interviews with male students. Following initial analyses of the interviews, a video-recorded class discussion was held to discuss the research findings. The data from the class discussion was captured under the four levels of individual, relationship, community and society, utilised by the World Health organization (WHO) in its World Health Report on Violence and Health. The analysis of the class discussion and the students’ own research reports revealed that at the individual level, risk and protective factors primarily revolve around the challenges of constructing a viable masculinity in specific social and economic contexts; at the relationship level, the key factors appear to be the experiences and expectations around gender roles and family dynamics; at the community level, it seems that weak or non-existent community networks and activities feed into increasing the risk of male community members becoming involved in violence. Each of these three levels needs to be understood against the historically specific backdrop of the societal ecological level: the gendered cultural values expressed in and reflectedby the wider social, economic and political contexts.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/170

Files in this item: 1

ClowesRisk&Protective2010.pdf (869.8Kb)

South African schools' responses to pregnant girls and young parents: a study of some Durban and Cape Town secondary schools

Bhana, Deevia; Clowes, Lindsay; Morrell, Robert; Shefer, Tamara (Agenda Feminist Media, 2008)

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Abstract:

Since the promulgation of the South African Schools Act in 1996 it has become illegal to exclude pregnant girls from school. Influenced by feminist research, policy has sought to assist pregnant girls and young parents to continue and complete their schooling on the understanding that having children often terminates school-going limiting future employment and work opportunities. This paper seeks to examine how the new policy has been understood and implemented. We focus on the views and experiences of principals and teachers as they are the authorities at school with the responsibility for ensuring that the policy is implemented. The paper draws on qualitative data collected by a larger study on being and becoming a parent at diverse group of schools in Kwazulu-Natal and the Western Cape. In the paper we investigate the extent to which schools’ responses to pregnancy and parenting reflect and/or reproduce normative gender roles and practices with respect to schooling and parenting in contemporary South Africa. We show also that despite familiar stereotypes about young parents and pregnancy, both teachers and principals take their pastoral responsibilities seriously. They do care and do try to help. But many teachers were judgemental and moralistic particularly in response to young girls.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/151

Files in this item: 1

BhanaSASchools2008.pdf (526.2Kb)

Accidental feminists? Recent histories of South African women

van der Spuy, Patricia; Clowes, Lindsay (History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2007)

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Abstract:	This article reviews Helen Scanlon's book, "Representation and reality", and Nombonisa Gasa's "Women in South African history", and locates each against the historiography of South African women's history
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/10566/139

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vanderSpuyAccidentalFeminists2007.pdf (173.5Kb)

Men and children: Changing constructions of fatherhood in Drum magazine, 1951-1965

Clowes, Lindsay (HSRC Press, 2006)

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Abstract:

This chapter explores changing representations of fatherhood and masculinity in Drum magazine over the course of the 1950s. In the early 1950s men were portrayed in close proximity to their children and adult masculinities were tied to being a father. Over the course of the 1950s this changed such that by the 1960s adult masculinities were portrayed outside the home and disconnected and distinct from their offspring.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/133

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ClowesFatherhood2006.pdf (287.7Kb)

Masculinity, matrimony and generation: Reconfiguring patriarchy in Drum 1951-1983

Clowes, Lindsay (Routledge, 2008)

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Abstract:

In this article I discuss some of the ways in which Drum tended to ascribe ‘modernity’ to particular practices and processes in opposition to other practices and processes portrayed as ‘traditional’. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, dominant discourses tended to signal (white) male adulthood through independent decision making alongside financial autonomy. In contrast African discourses tended to signal male adulthood through proximity to family members, through respect for age and seniority and through deference to the praxis of ‘tradition’. In the representations of black men in its pages, Drum magazine negotiated a somewhat disorderly path through these competing racialised discourses. I suggest that Drum’s claim that black males were indeed men was made through highlighting and condoning practices that demonstrated similarities and continuities between subordinate black and dominant white versions of manhood. In challenging the racial discourse the magazine paradoxically found itself simultaneously reinforcing western rather than African versions of manhood.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/132

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ClowesMasculinity2008.pdf (696.3Kb)

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