L "The Jungle posture" - HSRC
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“Th JJungle
“The l posture””
How does feminist and womanist theoryy and
consciousness help me figure out
Transformation at Universities,, and also help
p
me understand my own experience as an
African woman scholar?
Dr Nthabisengg Motsemme
motsemme@ukzn.ac.za
From Transformation to Productivity/Efficiency Policy
Di
Discourse : NB Pl
Plans and
dPPolicies
li i
• Higher Education Act [1997]
• White Paper 3 on Higher Education [1997]
• Funding of Public Higher Education [2003]
• DST Ten Year Innovation Plan [2009‐2014]
• Medium Term Strategic Framework [2008
[2008‐2018]
2018]
EMERGING POLICY IMPERATIVES • Efficiencyy • Productivity • Public Accountability • Internationalisation • Innovation and Commercialisation
Production of Dominant Productivity/Efficiency
Discourse
Production of a non‐raced; gender‐neutral, that is an
ahistorical subject
j
• Further marginalisation of voices already in the
periphery
• Privileges masculine experiences
• Re‐enforces masculine language of the academy:
quantifiable outputs
outputs, research productivity
productivity, bureaucracy
and efficiency; rationality
REPORTS Addressing the HIGH SKILLS
SHORTAGE (ie PhDs)
• Council for Higher Education Report: The Higher Education Monitor:
Postgraduate Studies in South Africa‐A Statistical Profile [2008]
• Th A
The Academy
d off Science
S i South
S th Africa
Af i RReport:
t The
Th PhD Study:
St d AnA Evidence
E id
Based Study on how to meet the demands for High Level Skills in an
Merging Economy [2011]
• The Development Bank of Southern Africa Report: The Challenges of
Transformation in Higher Education and Training Institutions in South
Africa [2010] –Badat Report
• The National Development Plan [2011]
NATIONAL PICTURE: Badat • Permanent staff at universities by race and gender, 2006: Female: African: 9%; Coloured: 2%; Indian: 4%; White 27% Male: African:15%; Coloured 3%; Indian 5%; White 35% • National statistics of black academic staff members from other universities: Rhodes: 21%; Stellenbosch: 15%; and Wits 25% (from Badat’s presentation Race and Racism in HE, 2011).
UKZN STAFF MEMBERS WITH PhDs: Rank, Race
and Gender 2011
SCENES FROM EVERYDAY LIFE IN ACADEMIA:
STORIES ARE STILL NB
• ACT 1: The imagined
g cohesive African community;
y;
Affirming wounded masculinities of African men;
Racism is harder on black men than women.
• ACT 2: On becoming a critical scholar; Alternative
epistemologies; transformative knowledge; feminist
consciousness.
• ACT 3: Institutional cultures; gender and ideology.
• Telling our stories/testimonies=celebrating our
survival;; connecting;
g; writing;
g; re‐representing
p g
Issues Emerging from Everyday Life
• Production of ahistorical academic subject
• Racist and sexist institutional cultures
• New complexities
l i i iin Finding
i di Voice
i
ÆSo how do we manoeuvre around these
shifting
f g institutional terrains‐”handle the
sharp end of a sword”
GENDERED INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES
• Hidden disempowering
p g discourses and p
practices
• Need Transformation of knowledge
• Glass Ceiling
• Institutional Ideology
• Gendered nature of Time
• New Concepts of Power that create new spaces for
women
• Challenge Privitisation of Gender Inequality: How deal
with sexism and love? (Sithole)
( )RACIALISED INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES
• Challenge
g universal and unmarked p position of whiteness
• Interrogate current Assimilation Models
• White women’s privileged positions within racialised
patriarchyÆ Ideological construction of white femininity
through racism and the forms of power it generates
• Racial difference works through the Intersection with
sexuality, womanhood and femininity
• In racial discourse power not monolithic, but operates wrt
other forms of powerÆ Need interwoven and context
sensitive account of power to unmask other forms of power
and privilege positionsRACIALISED INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES conti..
• Colonisation and Decolonisation of African universities
• Indigenous knowledge Systems (IKS)‐whose reality counts?
• Decolonising social science scholarship
• Af i
African perspectives
ti andd contributions
t ib ti tto kknowledge
l d
production: Oyewemi calls it “Recovering local ways of knowing”
• Afrocentric continuum hotly contested and stands in
opposition to Cosmopolitism
• Afrocentric Feminist and African Womanist epistemologies
• Not just gender and equality but also socio‐cultural (religious)
contexts
• How do we collapse Rights vs. Culture polarities?Alternative framework to analyse
women’s’ lives
li to be
b informed
i f d by:
b
• Situated/Grounded
/ in their experiences
p and
voices: Speaking from own experiential location
• Deepen our knowledges and ways we come to
know
• Multiple sites of knowledge‐’’not just book’’Æ
Possession metaphor helps
• Not rely on polarities but rather on intersection
of race, gender, class, sexuality
• AlsoÆHow individual, institutional and societal
forces intersect and impact on how women
experience the academyAlternative framework to analyse
women’s’ lives
l to be
b informed
f d by:
b
• Interrogation of hetero‐normative
hetero normative
masculinities
• Normative power of Whiteness
• Workings of power in the academy
• Transformative knowledge: Who remains the
producers of knowledge?
• Feminist/womanist consciousness: equips us
with Jungle posture ‐knowing where the
minefields are/Survival wisdomAlternative framework to analyse
women’s’ lives
l to be
b informed
f d by:
b
• Learning from existential resistance of poor women: Turning
to Alternative
l memory sites: refiguring
f spaces off agency:
body, cultural, spiritual
• Getting messy with spaces of Contradictions, ambiguity
P d
Paradoxes:“Learn
“L t sense, taste
to t t and d U/D that
th t paradox
d isi the
th
motor of things”‐ Jacqui Alexander; ‘’Sharp end of the sword’’
• Nepatleras‐what happens at the cracks? Nepatleras as‐‐
“mediators” “in
“mediators”, “in‐betweeners”,
bet eeners” “those who ho facilitate passages
between worlds…threshold people; those who live within and
among multiple worlds, and develop a perspective from the
cracks ”
cracks.
• Develop Threshold spaces: Offer possibilities of creating
broader and multiple imaginative frameworks where
different angled ways of ‘seeing,’
seeing, and ‘listening’
listening can occur.Other Feminisms…
• African feminist and womanist theory and consciousness that
allows us to U/D the relationship between Indv.
Consciousness and hidden institutional practices and how we
become bearers of discourses that reproduce masculine
academic cultures
• New Feminisms=Grassroots feminism; Ghetto
feminismÆbased on mores that directly engage the bodies
and desires of working class women; forefront pleasurable,
humanising possibilities within patriarchal spaces
• Reclamation of Humanity within marginalisation expressed
mostly via Alternative Sites, e.g. the body of pleasure; to be
d i d as humanising;
desired h ii b beauty and d sensuality
liHealing our Bodies, Intergenerational
connections; Healing
l Ourselves
l
• “And where there was suffering, there was always
supposed to be healing”
• “Mmangwana o tshwara thipa ka mo bogaleng
• “How
How did they persist in their beauty in spite of
everything?”
• “It
It is a paradox that feminism that has insisted on a politics
of a historicized self has rendered that self so secularized,
that it has paid very little attention to the ways in which
spiritual labour and spiritual knowing is primarily a project
of self‐knowing and transformation that constantly invokes
community simply because it requires it” (Alexander: 2005:
15).)Healing our Bodies, Intergenerational
connections; Healing
l Ourselves
l
• Healingg Methodologies g and the ‘’scholar as
healer’’: Fusion of heart and mind‐ “amour
intellectuals” ; healing and beauty as part of
intellectual and activist work; a cup of comfort is
also needed
• Inter‐generational dialogues; humanising; herein
lies the ‘creative redemptive force’
“The intergenerational connections on which the
flow of everyday life is premised were themselves
destroyed under the policies of apartheid”
(Ramphele 2000: 8).Mary Sibanda‐”They don’t make them like they
used to
to” AND Bonang Matheba
Matheba‐”AA night out in
town”
Thank‐you, Ngiyabonga for your
time.
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