The Women of SunLand: Narratives of Non-Compliant Women in the Daily Sun Tabloid Newspaper, South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid, patriarchal gender relations and the violence they generate continue to contradict the promise of the Bill of Rights contained in Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, which guarantees women a range of rights. How these contradictions are represented within popular media has implications for the achievement of gender justice, for they offer ways of imagining the forms that such justice might take. One popular local publication is the Daily Sun, a tabloid newspaper. Rather than simply aligning itself with the gender status quo, as tabloids in other spaces are sometimes accused of doing, the Daily Sun attempts both to critique and to form its readers’ social and gender identities as members of “SunLand”, the tabloid's imagined community. Using Connell's constructive model of the gender order, and interpretive methods in line with critical discourse analysis, including lexicalisation and narrative analysis, the author analyses the tabloid's 2011 coverage of women whose non-conforming and resistant femininities challenge patriarchal gender relations in township spaces. The findings suggest that while certain forms of non-compliant femininities are condemned, others are validated and the violent masculinities they resist censored. That non-compliant femininities can be also violent is a troubling feature of SunLand's gender order.

Keywords:

• Daily Sun
• tabloid
• gender relations
• patriarchy
• gender-based violence
• South Africa