Social media, dress and body marking: exploring young women's imaginative, “languages of the self”

abstract

This article is inspired by mixed methodology techniques that deepen and extend upon a long-standing tradition of archiving the quotidian experiences of ordinary South Africans through empirical research. By tapping into popular imaginaries and the liberatory potential of young women's use of social media and performance of embodied subjectivities in the post-apartheid imaginary, everyday interactions on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are incorporated to demonstrate a shared on-line social space for attention to body politics. The article integrates abstract (feminist) theory in practical ways by utilising creative and visual methodologies strategically to reveal young women who are participants with political questions about liberation, independence and social belonging. Here “body-talk” can be theorised as an action of resistance mediated by the visceral, affective, sentimental and sensual expressions of femininity. The article focuses on various visual and textual ways in which young women in Cape Town make sense of their social identities, understandings of freedom and potential as social actors. The contemporary multicultural democracy encompasses the spirit of an imagined community in which an unravelling or untidiness of difference in terms of race, sex, class and sexuality open up spaces for conversation around meanings of bodyhood. The entanglement of femininity, affect and body politics with social identities are not separable from young women's search for citizenship and social belonging. This search surfaces in the need to share experiences about what constitutes the everyday experience of a young woman's existence, and strategies of self-expression. Ultimately, “body-talk” is shown to inform practical wisdom about the everyday but more importantly, engages progressive social change and new forms of thinking around the “knowing subject” and young women as knowledge producers about themselves and their bodies.

keywords:

• selfie
• body-talk/bodyhood
• knowing-subject
• imagined community

Notes

1 Visual expression of a radical vernacular by marginalised voices connected to a “poetics of place” (Niedecker, 2008 cited in Roy, 2015:476). Body-talk may then be theorised as a form of womanspeak: a narrativisation that is deliberate, in its use of language, image and metaphor.

2 More information on each image is offered under Notes below the figures.

3 See: http://galadarling.com/getting-started-with-radical-self-love/

4 Clarissa Pinkola Estés's (1996) anthropological and feminist work Women Who Run with the Wolves forms a theoretical and methodological plinth in my study. Pinkola Estés (1996) highlights the importance of the individual psyche in the quest for wholeness. She draws on the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, cognitive and analytical psychology to derive that collective consciousness is parallel to psychic instinct.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monique Van Vuuren

MONIQUE VAN VUUREN is a PhD candidate based at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) who has a keen interest in raising awareness around women's literacy as connected to reading power. She is enthused by radical-feminism and the complicatedly politicised examination of the liberatory potential of young women's use of social media and performance of embodied subjectivities in the post-apartheid imaginary. Inspired by African literature and the need to build on a distinctive future for the humanities and social sciences, in Africa, she strives to contribute to innovative doctoral scholarship and a new generation of diverse Africa-based scholars who aim to work beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. Email: [email protected]