Selling sorrow: testimony,representation and images of HIV‐positive South African women

In post‐apartheid South Africa, testimony and personal narrative have opened a space for marginalised voices to emerge. At the same time, to testify is to occupy a position of vulnerability. This paper focuses on a series of self‐portraits by black HIV‐positive women and points to how their entry into the public sphere and the global art market has been conditioned by their social and economic marginality. These portraits have been read as ‘maps’, providing access to the truth of the subjects they represent. Such readings perpetuate rather than challenge the myth of the transparent, authentic African subject.     

“It’s More Appropriate for Men”: Management and Worker Perceptions of the Gendered Ideal Worker

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews at a Mexican-owned multinational manufacturing corporation, this article analyzes how perceptions of the ideal worker shift during workplace transformation to impact women and men differently. Prior to transformation, women and men perform distinct forms of labor on the shop floor. When the company moves from labor-intensive to technology-driven production, the ideal factory worker changes. Management (re)assesses and (re)values skills, responsibility, and commitment. These seemingly gender-neutral attributes create different outcomes. Automation and teamwork are recast as men’s work; women are sent home. I argue that women’s exit is not about the nature of the work. Rather, gendered stereotypes embodied in perceptions of the ideal worker justify and normalize women’s elimination from the factory. These findings reveal how presumed gender traits play a pivotal role in the company’s adjustment to global economic processes, privileging masculinity and devaluing femininity.     

“The ANC brand is bulletproof”: accountability and the logic of the brand in South African politics

In this paper, I draw on analyses of the brand in the commercial world to explore the implications of branding when applied to political parties and politicians. Specifically, I examine the ramifications of the logic of the brand for accountability within a multi-party democracy. I argue that in branding discourse, the brand serves as a risk-management strategy by creating relations of loyalty with consumers, designed to secure forgiveness for possible transgressions on the part of the brand and thus protect brand equity. Through an analysis of how branding discourse is applied to South African politics by journalists, political parties and participants in social media, I show how in this arena, branding logic works to defer accountability for political parties and politicians who fail to deliver on election promises. Culpability becomes assessed in terms of damage to brand.     

Like A Virgin: Temptation,Resistance, and the Construction of Identities Based on “Not Doings”

Despite the attention given to what actors do, identity theorists give virtually no attention to those behaviors in which individuals do not engage, the assumption being that these acts are not influential. In this article, I use the generic case of the virgin identity to demonstrate the social construction of what I term never identities, a subcategory of the various identities based on not engaging in particular acts (simply, not doings). Through the use of fictional genre, it becomes evident that such identities are not based on absence alone, but are more about demonstrated resistance to the trials of temptation and the evaluation of these tests by others. While this article focuses on the construction of such identities under specific historical circumstances, I argue that the findings lay the groundwork for further exploration of a largely overlooked yet critical area of identity research. Future research on never identities should consider the temporal norms of such identities (e.g., the expected stay in such states), the degree of technical purity required, and the issue of directionality (i.e., whether one can return to such identities subsequent to exiting).     

Corporate Restructuring, Downsizing, and the Middle Class: The Process and Meaning of Worker Displacement in the “New” Economy

This article conceptualizes, describes, and analyzes the phenomenon of corporate downsizing and the experience of worker displacement as a process of work and employment change that occurs within the context of structural changes in the economy, large firms and labor markets. The research is based on a case study of displaced IBM computer and Link aerospace workers in Binghamton, New York. Research participants encountered a process of displacement that began before job loss, as the firms abandoned longstanding paternalistic work relations and altered their internal labor market structures. Following job loss, displaced workers negotiated a job search in a declining Binghamton economy and a competitive local labor market. In subsequent employment, the majority of those in the study experienced significant work and employment change associated with downward mobility. The findings suggest that in the new economy, the concept of worker displacement should be thought of in more expansive terms than the more narrow and conventional definition that is often associated with it. Workers' experiences of downsizing, displacement and employment change were not simply, or even primarily, associated with job loss, but were characterized by significant departure from objective conditions and subjective meanings of work and of being workers.     

‘The sea inside us’: narrating self,gender, place and history in South African memories of the Hajj

¹ 1. From Mxolisi Nyezwa’s poem, ‘Sea’ (Nyezwa 2000 Nyezwa, M., 2000. Sea. In: Song trials. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 62.  [Google Scholar]). How do Muslims in South Africa recount the experience of pilgrimage? This paper considers the genre of oral and written South African hajj narratives and reflects on the insights they hold about Muslim subjectivity and history in South Africa. Pilgrimage is a complex theme, or, as Barbara Cooper (1999 Cooper, B.M., 1999. The strength in the song: Muslim personhood, audible capital, and Hausa women’s performance of the Hajj. Social Text, 60 (Globalization?), 87–109.  [Google Scholar]) phrases it, ‘the hajj presents an immensely complex “ethnoscope” of human movement of tremendous historical depth’ (p. 103). In this article, I take a literary and historical rather than sociological or quantitative approach to the topic of the hajj and examine one of the earliest published accounts of the hajj from the Cape – that of Hajji Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, who performed the hajj in 1910, along with oral testimonies about pilgrimage by ship in the 1950s and recently published accounts of pilgrimage by Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh (2000), Rayda Jacobs (2005 Jacobs, R. 2005. The Mecca diaries, Johannesburg: Jacana.  [Google Scholar]) and Rashid Begg (2011 Begg, R. 2011. The Hajj, Stellenbosch: Imvusa.  [Google Scholar]). In my analysis I consider the nature of the self and the voice, the relation of the spiritual to the quotidian, and the place of South Africa and South Africanness in these accounts. The article reveals that South African pilgrimage narratives are deeply compelling as an autobiographical practice and as an historical archive. They relate the universality of Islamic religious observance with the particularity of South Africa’s political and social realities in a seamless and illuminating nexus. I therefore argue that the hajj narrative as literary form offers new insights about the relation of the sacred and the profane, nation and religion, and gender and authenticity in South African Muslim life.     

Effluence, “waste” and African Humanism: extra-anthropocentric being and human rightness*

Abstract

I propose a extra-anthropocentric contextualisation of normative human rights as human rightness. To undo the normative construction of the human, I turn to a theory of the effluent. I argue effluent communities, defined as communities who have never depended on the state, re-envision normative human rights. Effluent communities suggest the necessity for a rethinking of the centrality of the state in Butlerian conceptions of precarity and grievability, since effluent communities have never found the state to be a source of such security. Further, I observe that this decentring of the state points to limitations in forms of postcolonial critical resistance that pose the state (be it colonial or postcolonial) as an adversary; or simply deconstruct the impossibility of the state’s support of the human through postmodernist scepticism. I analyse Mphahlele’s specific reading of African Humanism, demonstrating that it offers a way to grieve material being that is extrinsic to the lenses of the state, racially inflected abjection and subject/object-human/non-human animal binaries. Rather than name a set of effluent communities, I propose an exemplary bearing witness to the material dying/dead, instantiating what is commonly regarded as waste, if not toxic dirt, as the occasion for a practice of extra-anthropocentric human rightness.     

‘We are actually,after all,just children’: caring societies and South African infantilisation of adults with intellectual disability

This article comments on infantilisation by attending to South African adult intellectual disability (ID) care through an intersubjective ethics of care lens, and shows how such an ethic can shine light on shifting our responses towards ID. Care performance data were gathered from three sources within two South African specialist ID care sites – from 10 adult residents, 16 nurses as spatiotemporal carers, and three wards as ethnographic sites. Deeply embedded and interwoven throughout various care practices is the disabling of adults with intellectual impairment when literally referred to as ‘children’. These adult-unmaking processes constitute practices that fall short of Tronto and Kittay’s caring societies ethic. Care exchanges generate relational and intersubjective spaces in which people are understood as never meeting full criteria for personhood. Infantilising care dynamics require urgent attention if we wish to change ways in which ID is viewed and responded to in South Africa.     

“Walking the Tightrope:” Clinical Social Workers’ Use of Diagnostic and Environmental Perspectives

The purpose of this study was to understand how clinical social workers think about and utilize two distinct worldviews: the psychiatric perspective of DSM diagnosis (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and the contextual person-in environment perspective. The former is a requirement for service and reimbursement in nearly every clinical setting, while the latter has always been the hallmark of a distinctively “social work” approach. Although there have been quantitative surveys of social workers’ use of the DSM, this is the first qualitative study to examine how social workers actually navigate these two worldviews. Thirty clinical social workers took part in individual interviews, and their responses were analyzed thematically using HyperRESEARCH, a qualitative data management program. Findings reveal an array of ethical and practical issues, including the central “tightrope” of balancing the need to “ramp up” problem formulation in order to access service with the desire to “damp down” in order to minimize stigma and avoid pathologizing problems in living. Implications are addressed for social work practice, policy, and education.     

Egyptian Workers and “Their” Intellectuals: The Dialectical Pedagogy of the Mahalla Strike Movement

This article analyzes the development of the Egyptian workers' movement in the face of the 25 January Revolution through the notion of dialectical pedagogy. This Gramscian concept is extended by a Vygotskyan analysis of the reciprocal learning processes, which stimulate a proletarian activity system to overcome its economic-corporate predicament. The concrete case study of the Mahalla strike movement (2006–2008) elucidates the transformative-instructive dynamics of autoprolepsis and heterolepsis and the importance of solidarity in developing the worker Subject. The 25 January Revolution expanded the proletarian Zone of Proximal Development and created new possibilities and constraints for the development of the workers' movement.     

“Soft Power” and the Negotiation of Legitimacy: Collective Meaning Making in a Teacher Team

This article interrogates the “soft power” of teacher teamwork by probing the ways in which authority conditions the appropriation of institutional motives through collective meaning making. The study analyzes the interaction of a teacher-leader and a science teacher team across two settings of professional development organized to promote curricular reform in their U.S. secondary school. The premise of the analysis draws on frameworks from cultural-historical theories, sociological perspectives, and social semiotics to view authority as the outcome of relations of power and control. The analysis reveals how the negotiation of legitimacy in interaction functions to open up or close down possibilities for acquiring motives appropriate to subject matter, teaching, and student learning in teachers' professional practice. The article makes a novel contribution to post-Vygotskian theoretical development in its presentation of authority as an attribute of the dialectical relationship of person and society in the production of institutionalized objects.     

“Maybe If I Was 25, But I'm 40”: Age Identities,Work-Related Problems,and Distress Management

Previous research shows that social statuses strongly influence negative life events’ effects on mental health. Studies also show that identities are linked to mental health and can be partially based on age. However, there are few studies on age identities as they relate to the stress process. Using data from 48 in-depth interviews with 25 unemployed/underemployed people, I identify two work-related problems (constrained employment options and poor self-evaluations) and three coping strategies (social comparisons, alternate identities, and expanded employment options) related to age identities. Results illustrate the links between subjective aspects of age, age-based norms, distress, and coping strategies, and highlight the utility of integrating symbolic interactionist and structural approaches.     

Social documentary and personal investigations in contemporary South African photography: Tracey Derrick’s “One in Nine” series

A shell of white gauze floats against a split background in Tracey Derrick’s 2009 photograph, Inhabit – Habergeon – middle English, piece of armour to protect the neck and chest (Inhabit), both autonomous and materially frail. The shadowed wall lifts the calcified gauze towards the viewer, as its lithe body hovers above the vertical divide that separates light from dark. This position apart from the edge may be read as a passage missed or overcome. A year of invasive treatment following her diagnosis of stage two breast cancer in March of 2008 led South African documentary photographer Tracey Derrick to create a photographic series that combines her humanist sensibility with personal reflections on illness. Derrick represents meditations on her trajectory through illness in “One in Nine: My Year as a Statistic,” a collection of reposeful digital colour photographs – including Inhabit – that features the cast Derrick made to obtain accurate measurements for her prosthesis. This body of work complicates a widely held assumption that post-apartheid photography in South Africa focuses more on the individual than collective societal issues. Derrick’s unusual series warrants methodological treatment that attends to the complex ways in which the visual vocabulary and concerns of apartheid-era documentary photography overlap with the personal explorations associated with post-1994 photographic production. In this paper, I utilise socio-historical, psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of Tracey Derrick’s photograph and “One in Nine” series to elicit an interpretation of the image and series as statement of agency within a metaphorical battle against an invisible, yet pervasive disease. By reading Derrick’s photograph through these theoretical lenses, I reveal her image to be a metaphoric assertion of tenacity and Derrick’s agency, and highlight the areas of overlap between Derrick’s documentary practice and her more personal “One in Nine” project.     

“Malicious to the skin” The internalisation of corporal punishment as a teaching and a disciplinary tool among South African teachers

ABSTRACT

Corporal punishment has been legally banned in South Africa. However, anecdotal evidence suggests the prevalence of the practice in schools two decades after this legislative banning. Using the cultural-historical activity theory framework, this article qualitatively explores why teachers continue to use or believe in this method as a disciplinary tool. This study is based on interviews which emanated out of the individual and group interviews of 22 teachers and four retired teachers at a primary school in Mpumalanga province of South Africa. Findings suggest that the internalisation of childhood interpsychological processes related to discipline and experiences of corporal punishment account for the current manifestation of the phenomenon.     

“I Want a Better Life for Her”: Father-Adolescent Daughter Relationships in a Minority,Low-Income South African Community

Although research indicates the importance of fathers in adolescent daughters’ psychosocial development, father–adolescent daughter relationships have been neglected in both international and local research. Furthermore, the relatively small body of research that does exist has mostly been conducted in North American and European contexts. Our study aimed to generate knowledge about father–adolescent daughter relationships in a minority, low-income South African community. In this social constructionist informed community-based study, we explored father–daughter relationships in 42 individual interviews with father–daughter dyads. This article focuses on a prominent theme in the interview data that revolves around fathers’ repeated statements that they wanted their daughters to have betters lives than they themselves had and the parenting strategies they reported to achieve this aspiration. We conclude that these fathers could benefit from reflecting on the apparent limitations of their parenting practices and from knowledge and skills regarding more effective parenting practices.     

The making and unmaking of a “transborder nation”: South Korea during and after the Cold War

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea—and East Asia more broadly—into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

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