https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3318-3996
The focus of this issue of Agenda on changes and challenges within post-apartheid South Africa in relation to gender and the economy is most timely considering it is twenty-five years since political transformation. It draws our attention to two fields of intellectual engagement, namely Economics and Gender Studies, although for neither field is this an unusual convergence.
Economic research incorporates gender as a dimension into data collection and analysis; surveys and other investigative methods quickly establish whether respondents are male, female and sometimes ‘other’. Although such research produces significant findings along gender lines, this equates neither to a fundamental concern with the inequalities perpetrated by the systems of patriarchy nor capitalism. To the contrary, it is possible to attribute differences in findings along gender lines to essentialist notions of gender differences.
When it comes to Gender Studies, certain schools of feminist thought insisted on the interrelation of gender and the economic order in their attempts to account for the inequalities and injustices along gender lines. These materialist approaches include socialist feminism that emerged in northern spaces in the 1960s and 1970s and which provided a critique of the capitalist order of the economy. While this school of thought arose in a different geographical location and decades ago, two salient points can be noted. First, socialist feminists were explicit that class struggle could not and should not side-line feminist struggles as less relevant. They rejected the notion that the success of the class struggle would be accompanied by equality for women. Certainly this position had resonance within apartheid struggles when it was proposed that ‘emancipation’ should come first and ‘women’s liberation thereafter’, as Pat Horn discusses in interview in this issue.
The second point relates to the way in which socialist feminism considered how sexism and the gendered division of labour of each historical epoch is determined by the economic system of that time. In this way, the linking of class or economic status with gender and race indicates an inherent, albeit incipient, intersectional approach, although it was never described in those terms at that time. Certain feminist historians describe socialist feminism as intersectional to a degree at least for it initiated a broader analysis of societal structures. Its insistence on a broader analytic frame served as a catalyst within feminist scholarship that has subsequently exceeded the intersections that engaged the early socialist feminists. The deficiencies identified by black scholarship of racism within the socialist feminist movement and the whitewashing of gender studies programmes have expanded the field of gender studies and its intersections with other powerful societal discourses. Postcolonial and intersectional scholarship recognise how race, class and gender are inextricably linked. They also go beyond these three criteria to incorporate age, sexual orientation and geography among many other lines of categorisation.
This issue might focus on gender and the economy, but in the process it does more than that. Issues of race, age, education, media content, employment, unemployment and self-employment are incorporated here. Importantly, the extra burden of the work that most women (but especially those who are poor) must factor into their lives on account of their gender is included in these discussions. It is most appropriate that this issue is guest edited by Dori Posel and Daniela Casale, leading South African feminist economic scholars who address economic issues broadly and within a feminist framing.
This issue is going to press in 2019, a year in which reports of instances of gender-based violence in South Africa have been alarmingly numerous. The series of heinous crimes against women and girls have been met with street protests, a media storm and a series of social media campaigns such as #NotInMyName, #AmINext and #SAShutDown. Politicians, the news media tell us, once again have declared themselves outraged; promises of greater funding and more policing have been made. A range of campaigns voice their opposition to the various misogynistic forms of violence. Taxis even sport stickers that ‘Say NO to violence’. Frequently the response to perpetrators is to expurgate them as monstrous, as deviants. Yet what is absent from many of the responses is any serious reflection about the systemic circumstances in which such conduct occurs.
To understand the conduct of those denigrated as monsters necessitates a critique of patriarchy itself, of masculinities and femininities that engender such violence. Yet, this too is insufficient. In a country where there is such a marked difference between the haves and the have nots and where the unemployment rate is very high (as the articles in this issue attest to), the violence that poverty begets has to be acknowledged. The act of, and responses to, gender-based violence might seem distant from the theme of gender and the economy. However, it requires us to contemplate how poverty and frustration are systemically generated; it requires us to acknowledge the cruelty of poverty and its gendered manifestations.
ORCID
Jeanne Prinsloo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3318-3996