Transcript MTEC PRESENTATION - University of South Africa

AT THE ALTAR OF SACRIFICE: TRADITIONAL
INEQUALITIES AND DEMOCRATIC EQUALITIES
TRADITIONS 18 .11.2009
SOWETO HOTEL
Kgamadi Kometsi
National Coordinator: Racism and NonDiscrimination
[email protected]
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INTRODUCTION

Ain’t nothing like a real thing: Things authentic
 Social
identities
 Racial
 Sexual
 Gender
Inclusion/Exclusion = haphazard
Us + them dynamic =>
Effect may be fatal!
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INTRODUCTION
Binary gender system
 Men and women essentially different
 Prescriptions and discrete boundary
 Straddling => negative sanction

 Call
into line
 Coerce into commitment
 Dismembering
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INTRODUCTION
Gender identity = relational
Masculinity depending on what it means
not to have some other identity
Depends on femininity and boundaries
with alternative masculinities
Being man = not being woman
NB: Rival masculinities
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INTRODUCTION

Qualifying as a man - Demonstrable
characteristics:
 Not
a woman
 (Hetero)sexual prowess; sexual conquest of women;
heading a nuclear family; siring children; physical +
material competition with other men; independence;
behavioural autonomy; rationality; strict emotional
control; aggressiveness; obsession with success and
status; certain way of walking and talking, etc.
***
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DEMOCRATIZATIONS AND MASCULINITIES
The need to empower women
 Powerful groups and redistribution of
power (change)
 Masculinity (security) resting on
female repression: => Resistance
 Constructions of desire/conceptions
of death in constructions of masculine
identity: Considerations of how one
wants to live or die

DEMOCRATIZATIONS AND MASCULINITIES
Appeals to change =
• Appeal to be un-masculine
• Affront to what it means to being real
man, normal man, natural man
• Inhabit the unknown
• A male without masculinity (female)
• A monster
• A body without its essential spirit
• A mutation with no specifiable
identity
DEMOCRATIZATIONS AND MASCULINITIES
 Appeals to change or challenges against
their dominance  expose fragility of
men and their practices
 Changing positions of women  men’s
subjective understanding of what it
means to be men
 Being men and the essence of femininity:
Where ‘real’ masculinity fails, femininity
takes over
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UYINDOD’ ENJANI?
 The power of tradition
becoming a man: In Xhosa tradition, this is
achieved through one means only: circumcision
Resistance => cultural (or social) impasse
The reverence and commitment that seem to
characterise how lessons from these practices are
received and lived out
rare moments of receptivity in the construction of
men and their practices
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UYINDOD’ ENJANI?
The making of man
• certain rituals, which are perceived to create
men
•‘men are artificially made while women are
naturally born’
•an important intervention for a reading of
changing men’s practices: ‘subject positions are
coercive and complex’
•NB: Pain of circumcision and risks involved!
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UYINDOD’ ENJANI?
The making of man – effect of initiation rites:
‘...to dramatize the change of status through
symbolic rebirth – while at the same time
operating directly and drastically at a
psychological level, on the bonds to women
and their world, which the novices must live
behind’
NB: Individuation process ‘completion’
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UYINDOD’ ENJANI?
Problematics:
 Women : visibilities and invisibilities
 Isigqwathe/snort
 Ukwesula / ‘House of the lamp’
 Marriage and gradations
 Other masculinities
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UKUTHWALA
The intending bridegroom, with one or two friends
will waylay the intended bride in the
neighbourhood of her own home, quite often late
in the day, towards sunset, or early dusk, and
they will forcibly take her to the young man’s
home. Sometimes that girl is caught unawares,
but in many instances she is ‘caught’ according to
plan and agreement. In either case, she willput
up a show of resistance to suggest to onlookers
that it is against her will, when in fact it is hardly
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UKUTHWALA

Differentiation from abduction
 Marriage

= basis
Resistance and the preservation of dignity
So acceptable is the thwala custom to the people, so
pretended is the resistance put up by the girl known to
be, and so good is the reason for the thwala, viz, the
formation of marriage, that no onlooker ever interferes
and tries to stop the thwala because of the crocodile
tears that the woman sheds in the process
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UKUTHWALA
OR Tambo District Municipality – Mthatha
Seminar
 Ascendancy of Ukuthwala in the 1920s
 50% of marriages were initiated through
ukuthwala
 NB: Newer developments

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UKUTHWALA
Manifestations (Inkolo Kantu):
 Woman of marriageable age – willing party
 Woman of marriageable age – refuses to marry
 Parental disapproval – man and woman elope
 Economic circumstances – man and woman
marry themselves and work to pay lobola
together
NB: Constitutional value of equality!
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UKUTHWALA
The insertion of children in this practice
 Men and women involved in the abduction
 Supposed spouse forcing himself on girl child
 Supposed spouse and HIV or AIDS or TB
 14 year olds expected to bear children
 Escorts and restricted movement
 Sexual custody by migrant workers
 Promises of further schooling – pipedream
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UKUTHWALA
Complicity and resistance of women
 Less complicated
 Selective
understanding of rights (CRL)
 The best interests of the child
Women as primary oppressors/participants in
the oppression of other women =>
complexification!
 NB: African feminism and Western feminisms

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WAY FORWARD: RESEARCHERS AND ACTIVISTS
Primordial or Instrumental: Support!
 Approach traditional spaces with care
 Inherent challengers within patriarchal systems
 Imposed, external attempts to change – futile

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WAY FORWARD: RESEARCHERS AND ACTIVISTS
Claims to truth
 Ideological positions of researchers/activists
 Claims to truth are discursively situated and
implicated in relations of power
 However, not simply effects of power
 Truth involves regulative rules
 Truth internally related to meaning
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WAY FORWARD: RESEARCHERS AND ACTIVISTS
Claims to truth


Appreciating the participants’ vantage point
Power visibility – when claims of universal truth present
contradictions to observed practices
Researchers: What we see is what we already value
(constructionists)
NB: Research value orientations should not influence
research findings
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THANK YOU!
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