Narratives of resistance and resilience: Exploring stories of violence against women

abstract

Violence against women is extremely prevalent in South Africa, with one of the highest levels of reported rape world-wide. This article highlights the voices of young women who experienced fear and violation in South Africa, more specifically their acts of resistance in the face of adversity and their process of resilience. The article is based on research which explored how women’s lives and identities are transformed by living in violent spaces, such as South Africa. The research adopted a biographical-interpretive methodology and drew on psychosocial and narrative theory, as well as literature surrounding the social-ecological systems approach of resilience and research on resistance. Free-association narrative interviews were conducted with 27 female university students in Cape Town and narrative theory was used to analyse the interview texts. The article draws on the interviews of three of these women. Findings reveal how these women are not just ‘victims of patriarchy’ but are agentic beings capable of acts of resistance and demonstrating resilience in the face of violence and adversity. Situating the women’s narrative responses to the violence within their social ecologies reveals firstly, the importance of women’s agentic selves, and secondly, the critical limits on an over-reliance on women’s individual strengths and resilience. It is argued that it is neither just nor sustainable to expect women to carry the individual responsibility for sexual violence alone. Instead, the burden rests on society to remedy the high level of incidence of sexual violence with which women live.

keywords:

• gender
• resilience
• resistance
• violence against women

ORCID

Sarah Frances Gordon http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5131-8519

Notes

1. The term ‘Coloured’ is used instead of ‘mixed-race’ as it describes “those South Africans loosely bound together for historical reasons such as slavery and a combination of oppressive and preferential treatment during apartheid, rather than by common ethnic identity” (Erasmus and Pieterse, 1999:169). The term ‘Coloured’ was originally a white-imposed apartheid racial categorisation (Erasmus and Pieterse, 1999). As a researcher, I acknowledge that these racial categorisations are embedded in apartheid ideology and are socially constructed.

2. This study gained ethical clearance through the University of Cape Town’s ethics board. All ethical procedures were followed. Pseudonyms are used in the article to protect the identity of the participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Frances Gordon

SARAH FRANCES GORDON, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the field of gender and politics in the department of political science at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cape Town. Her primary research interests include: gender, politics, identity, violence against women, HIV/AIDS and other critical social issues. She has several years of community work and social activism experience in the field of trauma and violence against women. Email: [email protected]