Norms and Discourses of Class: Disciplining Young Educated Womxn’s Political Engagements in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Class-based analysis has become one of the key academic approaches to examining political behaviour in South Africa. As its usefulness in the context of high inequality is contested, this article seeks to contribute to the debates on its analytical potential based on interviews and group discussions with womxn¹ studying at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing on Foucauldian theorising on power of norms and discourses, and theories of intersectionality, this paper shows that the expectations attached to middle classness and eliteness in South Africa contribute to the maintaining of the existing systems of power by seeking to discipline young educated womxn away from becoming political change-makers. The effectiveness of this class-based disciplinary power is in its embeddedness in other systems of domination, including gender, race and age. Thus, only within an intersectional critical framework, does the category offer a useful lens for understanding how power impacts South African politics.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my colleagues at SOAS and the Department of Sociology at UJ, especially Prof Kammila Naidoo, for their support with my doctoral research, based on which this article was written, and which was financially supported by SOAS Research Studentship. I am grateful to Dr Siphelo Ngcwangu for his comments on an earlier draft of this article and the reviewers for their suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I place an x in womxn to disrupt the prevalent approach to thinking about gender and sex as binaries.

2 In this paper I use the term ‘Black’ to collectively denote Black African, Indian/Asian, and Coloured racial identifications used by the South African government, because people who were categorised along these racial categories by the apartheid regime were jointly oppressed, exploited and dehumanised. However, I recognise the differences in the past and present lived experiences of the people who are grouped under this term and the fact that many do not understand their lived experiences in terms of Blackness. Moreover, I also acknowledge the variety of ways people self-identify using terminology that may not correspond with the official categories, for example African, Native African, Black African, or who choose not to see themselves in terms of racial identity. Additionally, it must be clarified that most scholarship on the BMC in South Africa uses the term Black to refer to Black Africans only. Lastly, I write all Black identifications with upper case letters, while maintaining white with a lower case w, as an epistemic expression of solidarity with the political efforts of those, who seek to change the negative values and political exclusion, which were ascribed to their Black racial identities by the capitalist, patriarchal, colonial regimes, and which have been used to disempower them.

3 Rodney (2012, 216) for example argued that ‘Colonialism did not create a capital-owning and factory-owning class among Africans or even inside Africa; nor did it create an urbanized proletariat of any significance (particularly outside of South Africa)’. Hence, stratification in Africa was not seen in Marxist, economic class terms, but through the prism of ethnicity or other social relations (Neubert and Stoll 2018). In recent years, the examples of studies elsewhere on the continent include Sumich (2016) on Mozambique; Cheeseman (2015) and Spronk (2014) on Kenya, and Resnick on Zambia (2015) and Lentz (2015) and Musyoka (2018) for cross-country overviews.

4 ‘New’ BMC refers to the changes in size and composition of the middle class which were ushered in with the end of apartheid and the removal of policies that restricted social mobility based on race. However, it does not suggest that there was no BMC before the democratic dispensation, as some Black people were given political, economic and education opportunities during this time as a means of co-optation by the apartheid regime in order to fragment racial solidarities that were threatening the establishment (Khunou 2015).

5 Drawing on Oinas, Onodera, and Suurpää (2017) in their work on youth politics, I use the term ‘political engagement’ in this article instead of participation, in order to challenge the traditional approaches used in political science scholarship, which predominantly treat political participation through conventional and unconventional modalities, such as voting, protesting, or talking about politics. The term ‘engagement’ thus challenges the assumption of what it means to be political, and as Oinas et al. put it, it is ‘signalling all kinds of involvements in enacting change that materialize and are felt in everyday life’ (2017, 3).

6 I differentiate elitism and eliteness, with the former being defined as ‘leadership or rule by an elite’; ‘the selectivity of the elite; especially snobbery’ or ‘consciousness of being or belonging to an elite’ (‘Elitism’ 2018). On the other hand, eliteness captures what it means to be and to do eliteness, and despite the fact that some authors, such as Thurlow and Jaworski (2017), use the two terms interchangeably, I distinguish them to show that people might think of being elite beyond the value of selectivity.

7 Fallism is an umbrella term deployed here to speak about various forms of activism and campaigning that focus on causes of social injustice that ‘must fall’ and whose origins are said to be in the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015. RMF grew into various campaigns, including #PatriarchyMustFall and #FeesMustFall, which spread across the country, but concurrently had localised, campus-specific iterations, including for example #OpenStellenbosch (Luescher and Klemencic 2016; Luescher, Loader, and Mugume 2017).

8 Intersectionality as a term was coined by Crenshaw (1991) and is a product of Black Feminist thought and activism, including by Hill Collins (1993) or the Combahee River Collective (1977) amongst others. Its use and interpretations, including within political science research, have become contested over the decades, especially as the concept has travelled from the USA (Bilge 2013; Mügge et al. 2018; Salem 2016). It arose from the experiences of marginalisation of working class/poor Black womxn across various public and private spheres, and hence it connects with the rich epistemology of womxn of colour around the world, including decolonial/ anti-colonial/ post-colonial feminists in the Americas, Asia and Africa (Mendoza 2016). Contrary to the frequent usage of the concept in a way that freezes and pre-determines identity categories, intersectionality with its focus on specificity of spatial and temporal context enables one to approach identities, and hence the systems of inequality that they are attached to, as fluid and subject to change. Consequently, class identities or identifications as Hall (1996) puts it to capture the instability of identities, are not pre-set and static, but shift and become relational in response to power, which enables people to respond and change their own understanding of their positionality in response to various discourses, which this study examines.

9 It must be acknowledged that the data and the arguments presented in this article are a product of specific engagements between me as a white European male researcher and the students. Hence, they represent situated knowledge which was shaped by research encounters that were part and parcel of the systems of power and inequality which were being discussed.

10 Students in my research were able to self-identify or not identify at all with a particular race and were not given any pre-existing racial categories to relate to. As I maintain the language of their choice, there is a variety of terminology used in my description of the individual students throughout the article. This terminology is separate from my own use of the term Black as described earlier. It may be confusing to the reader; however, it relates the unstable nature of identities and the situation of flux and contestation that surrounds normative belonging in present day South Africa.

11 Students are referred to by either their real names or pseudonyms, which they selected themselves after having been advised about their potential identification, so that they can exercise their own agency in the knowledge-production process. However, as an extra measure of precaution against potential backlash against opinions that might be seen as controversial, some of the students’ names were withheld despite their permission to use them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.