The Current State of South African Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences

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Notes

1. I have a fuller review of Shireen Hassim's book in a forthcoming edition of the South African Historical Journal.

2. The editor should have picked up on Van Zyl's misattribution of Catherine MacKinnon's ‘sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism’ to Joan Scott (233).

3. For those interested in this, Beth Goldblatt's chapter has a brief discussion of mainstream theories of citizenship, including those of Marshall (122); also Conway (95).

4. The Charter was a product of the Women's National Coalition, formed to promote women's demands during the negotiations process.

5. I am not suggesting this is a research method delivering definitive results.

6. This review article really needs an underpinning essay on the historiographies of feminism in the west and in Africa, in order to avoid some of the inevitable confusion, which I think some of my comments may produce. Let me cross some of my ‘i's’ and dot some of my ‘t's’. Notwithstanding the longevity of third-world traditions of variously-understood feminist scholarship, the history of academic professionalisation in the west has a different trajectory to that in the south. The observation that women's studies represented a ghettoised tradition is an example of a western instance of self-reflexivity.

7. Britton undermines her own assessment of this argument through her apparent ignorance of the introduction in Walker's 1991 edition.

8. To illustrate this – and to put some of my cards on the table – I should say that I am reasonably well if not well acquainted with most of the writers referred to in this piece. Most of those I have not met are non-South Africans.

9. Both my reviewers – thank you for your comments – disagreed with this point. The view is my own, and represents my reading of the local scholarship. Since I am still likely to be shot down for this, let me say some more in my defence. I am trying to make a point about abstract representations of local scholarship on women and gender. At a meta-level, South African writing on women is still over-determined by the scars of the feminist debate. The issue is still, to put it more colloquially, too close to home. In some, but not all, cases this results in the effects I have outlined. Research based outside the country is free from this over-determination for the reasons I have given. It is under these circumstances that I make my comments about Africa after Gender. I should also say that I would not make these comments about many other volumes emanating from the north. Perhaps the issue then is not geographical location but good versus bad scholarship.