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Feminist scholars have focused on paid domestic labour as a site of gendered inequalities structured by race, gender, class, and citizenship. However, men are largely absent from feminist intersectional understandings of everyday interactions within paid domestic labour. This paper draws on an interview study of South African domestic workers focusing on their talk about interactions with male employers. The analysis demonstrates that talk about routines of the physical and symbolic absence of men can become normalised within domestic labour discourse. This is a narrative that is only brought to light once men's (lack of) presence is made a topic. The conspicuous absence of analyses of this kind within paid domestic labour studies points to unfinished and troubling feminist projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, the contours of skills formation systems are traced back to early struggles over control of apprenticeship. This paper uses a curriculum lens to examine two distinctive policy moments in the history of formal apprenticeships in South Africa and to trace the legacy imprint of direct and indirect race-based exclusion as well as the imprint of educational deprivation in social class terms. The policy trajectory shows how an apprenticeship curriculum that had to cater for White working-class youth with low educational credentials led to a steady erosion of the formal knowledge component of the curriculum in favour of practical workplace experience. Alongside race-based exclusion, a neglect of science-based knowledge emerges as a lasting curriculum legacy of apprenticeship trajectories under conditions of segregation, Apartheid and their colonial precursors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early sexual debut is of major concern because it is a correlate for health and economic shocks experienced in adulthood. In South Africa, this concern has provided impetus for research directed at the HIV and AIDS epidemic, teenage pregnancy and the effect of adolescent sexual behaviour on persistence in school. Of interest to the present study is high school completion, which is a well-established empirical barometer of adult socioeconomic opportunities. Using data from the five waves of the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), this paper examines the association between sexual behaviours initiated in pre- and early adolescence and high school completion rates. The CAPS study is a longitudinal survey that was designed to investigate young people's (aged 14-22 years) educational attainment and sexual behaviours in Cape Town, South Africa. The sample was constituted from 3213 individuals who had initiated sex during their teenage years and the analysis was undertaken when the youngest cohort was aged 21, an age at which they should have completed high school if they were on time. Logistic regression models were fitted separately for males and females. Overall, the results reveal that early sexual debut is correlated with long-term negative educational outcomes. Individuals who experience early sexual debut are less likely to complete high school than their counterparts who make their sexual debut later on in life. This effect is worse for Africans, who also disproportionately have an earlier sexual debut than other race groups. Apart from race however, the findings also reinforce the effect of other demographic factors on high school completion, namely, place of residence and family socioeconomic status as measured by parental education and household income. Hence, early sexual debut adds another layer of inequality and worsens the plight of Africans, females, those living in rural areas and those who come from low-income families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African women’s narratives of giving birth in public sector obstetric contexts. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2012 with 35 black, low-income women living in Cape Town, South Africa, the analysis focuses on obstetric violence as a relational, disciplinary, and productive process that has implications for the construction of women’s subjectivities and agency during childbirth. The findings focus on relational constructions of violence and agency in women’s narratives, including (a) the performance of docility as an act of ambiguous agency and (2) resistant bodies and modes of discipline. Framed within a Foucauldian approach to power and using the concept of assemblage, I argue that obstetric violence needs to be conceptualized as more than isolated acts involving individual perpetrators and victims. Instead, the analysis shows that obstetric violence functions as a mode of discipline embedded in normative relations of class, gender, race, and medical power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the number of graduate students has been identified as a priority for South African universities. Despite the shortage of graduate students in South Africa and the impetus to increase the number of graduate students, little is known about some of the impediments that undergraduate students, particularly Black students, face in pursuing graduate school. This paper critically examines the role of the family, social class, and race in considering the pursuit of graduate studies, from the perspective of students. The research adopts intersectionality as a theoretical framework and is based on focus group interviews with student participants. The findings indicate that race and social class must be understood as factors that operate concurrently and that participants' educational plans are informed by the needs of their family and by raceclass factors. Socio-political and economic factors in South Africa are also discussed in relation to the family, class, race and the pursuit of graduate studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tries to explain how, 14 years into democracy, the poor have moved from being central to post-apartheid reconstruction to being depicted by political leaders as lacking moral fibre and depending on 'handouts'—from deserving to undeserving poor. This has occurred within the ruling African National Congress, even though sympathy for the poor remains constant outside of government. To do so, the paper starts in mid- and late-nineteenth-century England, where Victorian intellectuals and policy-makers grappled with the challenge of a growing urban proletariat and the emergence of what Disraeli described as 'two nations'—a recurrent theme of the ANC government under President Mbeki—and the two newly democratising countries grappled with the 'revolutionary threat and humanitarian disgrace' of poverty. The paper then analyses recent ANC discourse around the poor and anti-poverty interventions. The unresolved tensions within the ANC-led tripartite alliance, it is argued, are directly implicated in its failure adequately to conceptualise poverty, and 14 years into democracy, South Africa lacks an anti-poverty strategy, targets, or target groups. The paper ends by suggesting a method for identifying the 'ultra-poor', which is critical in place of the 'spray and pray' approach currently in use if poverty is substantially to be rolled back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Seetsele Modiri Molema's World War I stay in Glasgow during which, in addition to his medical studies, he completed a lengthy argumentative history of African southern Africans. In analysing this vital episode of Molema's life, this paper engages with one of Shula Marks's most substantial contributions to the historiography of the past three decades: the concept of ambiguity as a means of understanding the complex relationship between class and consciousness. Ambiguity characterised Molema's Glasgow experiences, and fuelled the history he wrote during this temporary exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that some of the key determinants of the style and repertoire of the South African township revolts of the mid-eighties lie in the changing configurations of race, class and authority within townships over a long period of time. One major and pivotal change in these relationships is identified, and the paper employs ideal-typical constructions of the nature of townships in the two crucial eras concerned: what could broadly be described as the era of "welfare paternalism" and succeeding it after a period of complex change, the equally broadly characterized era of "racial modernism". Though both eras were racist, exploitative, and engendered class and community struggles they differed from one another in important stylistic and spatial ways. This paper suggests that the move from the one era to the other constitutes the move from a mode of "governability" to one of "ungovernability", and highlights the form, repertoire and style of rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrasonography images and their derivatives have been taken up in a range of ‘public’ spaces, including medical textbooks, the media, anti-abortion material, advertising, the Internet and public health facilities. Feminists have critiqued the personification of the foetus, the bifurcation of the woman’s body and the reduction of the pregnant woman to a disembodied womb. What has received less attention is how these images frequently intersect with race, class, gender and heteronormativity in the creation of idealised and normative understandings of pregnancy. This paper focuses on the discursive positioning of pregnant women as ‘mothers’ and foetuses as ‘babies’ in online media targeted at a South African audience, where race and class continue to intersect in complex ways. We show how the ontologically specific understandings of ‘mummies’ and ‘babies’ emerge through the use of foetal images to construct specific understandings of the ‘ideal’ pregnancy. In the process, pregnant women are made responsible for ensuring that their pregnancy conforms to these ideals, which includes the purchasing of the various goods advertised by the websites. Not only does this point to a commodification of pregnancy, but also serves to reinforce a cultural understanding of White, middle-class pregnancy as constituting the normative ‘correct’ form of pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the role of women farmers in the agricultural development in South Africa. Some of the most important changes in the in the agricultural sector of South Africa includes the introduction of labour legislation to agriculture, changing government structures following political transformation in 1994 and the increasing feminization of the agricultural labour force, particularly on fruit and wine farms in the Western Cape Province. The empowerment of women is essentially a feminist concern. The purpose of this article is to examine the activities of the Cape Women's Forum and the Women on Farms Project aimed at empowering farm women and to interpret the underlying assumptions regarding women's shared interests guiding their divergent approaches from a feminist perspective. In order to demonstrate women's marginalization, the paper begins with an overview of farm women's position on South African fruit farms. The second part of the paper examines the activities and programmes of the two groups directed at the empowerment of farm women. Information on the programmes, activities and strategies of the two women's groups was obtained through a detail analysis of mission statements, published programmes and other written documents of these groups.

This paper uses case studies of communities in Durban Functional Region to examine the general and intertwined processes of social differentiation and decompression unleashed by the disintegration of apartheid reform, the endemic violence in the 1980s and 1990s, and the transition to a non-racial democratic society. It is argued that under apartheid the black residential townships compressed together a variety of social classes and groupings, as well as compressing a large number of people (extended family members, younger married sons and daughters, relatives, kinsmen, tenants) into those households which had the legal right to be in and have access to houses in the urban areas. The relaxation of controls as well as violence ad the general turbulence or the period resulted in a process of splitting and fragmentation of households and families and their re-constitution both spatially and socially within new and distinct residential areas on the peripheries of the old townships and the rise of large squatter settlements on the peripheries of the cities. The paper begins with a brief overview of the inherited spatial structure of the city and the impact of violence and crime in the breakdown of the racial urban form. It then examines the dynamics of movement and resettlement over a number of historical phases, followed by an attempt to quantify the size, growth and spatial distribution of population. The final two sections examine the processes of social differentiation and decompression in the urban population and in the metropolitan core areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals how urban theories traditionally rooted in northern cities and academies are challenged and redeveloped by southern perspectives. Critiques of urban theory as narrowly northern (or Anglo-American) have recently emerged, spawning the comparative urbanism movement that calls for urban theories to be open to the experiences of all cities. Using the example of the sale of state-subsidised houses in South Africa, this research uses two parallel concepts, gentrification and downward raiding, to challenge the northern empirical focus of urban theory. Despite describing similar processes of urban class-based change, the concepts are rarely considered analogous, entrenched in divergent empirical contexts and academic literatures. While gentrification debates largely reference the northern central city, downward raiding is reserved for the southern ‘slum’. In contrast, this research develops ‘hybrid gentrification’ as a concept and methodological approach that demonstrates how non-northern urban experiences can and should create and refine urban theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white youngladies– with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces three political mobilizations in the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg: a boycott of redistributive tax policies, the creation of gated communities and residents' associations, and the demand for residential city improvement districts (CIDs). I argue that state rescaling and networked governance are constituted through struggles over governmental power. I also argue for more attention to race in the political economy of scale. Struggles over the scalar, networked, and territorial dimensions of governance are constitutive moments in the shifting articulation of race, class, and space. An analysis of articulation highlights the role of territory, identity and imagination in the production of space, demonstrates that neoliberal forms of networked governance are products of struggle, and reiterates the feminist argument that governmental interventions are about more than just capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of language shift from African languages to English (and Afrikaans) in South Africa, using home language data from the South African population census (1996 and 2001). Although census data have been criticised for its 'essentialist' construction of language, they nevertheless provide sociolinguists with a unique opportunity to analyse language choice and shift across large populations, based on a full head-count rather than statistical sampling. The focus of the discussion is on the metropolitan city of Cape Town (with its three-language profile, Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa). The methodology uses small-area statistics to understand the role of social variables (social class, age and gender) in structuring processes of past and present language shift. The results show that language shift (a) has considerable historical depth in South Africa, (b) shows clear patterns of spatial and social variation and (c) is not limited to the middle classes which linguists have often seen to be at the centre of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the land restitution process and the return of, or compensation for, land taken for racial reasons since 1913, explores how the South African ANC government balances the search for economic growth and undoing historical and social injustices underpinned by efforts to balance universal citizenship with recognition of difference. Land restitution, the third leg of South Africa's land reform, has entered a critical phase, with the planned restoration of hundreds of highly developed commercial farms in Limpopo Province to claimant communities in the face of substantial landowner resistance and government over-commitment. The combination of productive land, substantial export revenues, pervasive restitution claims and past disappointments has led the government to embrace a new model of restitution. Successful claimant communities will form a joint venture company with a private entrepreneur and with a small share reserved for farm workers. This new modified business model raises a series of fundamental questions about how the South African government balances its responsibility for providing economic and social development while achieving social justice. A related question is how it equalises the three sources of inequality: race, gender and class. The paper, based upon fieldwork in northern Limpopo Province, analyses these emerging tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based largely on a study of two collections of private papers housed at Petworth House and Hagley Hall (United Kingdom), this article analyzes the domestic politics within an early twentieth-century South African household. It explores the apparent motives behind the creation by Hugh and Maud Wyndham of an ostentatious, gentrified lifestyle in urban Johannesburg, where their home soon became a cocoon of Britishness in an increasingly uncomfortable part of the empire. It reveals the often difficult relationships between them and their servants and among the servants themselves; from hiring and firing, to the servant hierarchy and their different duties, to the rapid and enduring impact of the First World War. Yet, as many servants realized, service in "a good house" held certain compensations and equipped some for transition to their own domestic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theoretical work hypothesises that a polarised society like South Africa will suffer a legacy of ineffective social capital and blocked pathways of upward mobility that leaves large numbers of people trapped in poverty. To explore these ideas, this paper employs a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. Novel econometric analysis of asset dynamics over the 1993–98 period identifies a dynamic asset poverty threshold that signals that large numbers of South Africans are indeed trapped without a pathway out of poverty. Qualitative analysis of this period and the period 1998–2001 more deeply examines patterns of mobility, and confirms the continuation of this pattern of limited upward mobility and a low-level poverty trap. In addition, the qualitative data permit a closer look at the specific role played by social relationships. While finding ample evidence of active social capital and networks, these are more helpful for non-poor households. For the poor, social capital at best helps stabilise livelihoods at low levels and does little to promote upward mobility. While there is thus some economic sense to sociability in South Africa, elimination of the polarised economic legacy of apartheid will ultimately require more proactive efforts to assure that households have access to a minimum bundle of assets and to the markets needed to effectively build on those assets over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Inequalities in mental health are a notable and well documented policy concern in many countries, including South Africa. Individuals' perception of their position in the social hierarchy is strongly and negatively related to their mental health, whilst the global burden of poor mental health is greater amongst women. This paper offers a first glimpse of the factors that shape gender-based health inequalities across subjective social status. Methods: This study employs the cross-sectional 2014 South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS). The prevalence of depressive symptoms is measured with the aid of the CES-D 8-item scale, with analyses disaggregated by gender. Concentration indices (CI) are used to measure inequalities in depressive symptoms related to subjective social status. The study applies the Wagstaff decomposition to determine the factors that contribute to these gender-based inequalities. Results: More than 26% of the study sample had depressive symptoms (95% CI 24.92–28.07). The prevalence of depressive symptoms is significantly more pronounced in females (28.46% versus 24.38%; p = 0.011). The concentration index for depressive symptoms is − 0.276 (95% CI -0.341 – − 0.211), showing large inequalities across subjective social status. The observed SSS-related inequality in depressive symptoms however is higher for males (CI = -0.304) when compared to females (CI = -0.240) (p = 0.056). The most important contributor to SSS-related inequalities in depressive symptoms, at 61%, is subjective social status itself (contributing 82% in females versus 44% in males). Other variables that make large contributions to the inequalities in depressive symptoms at 11% each are race (contributing 2% in females versus 25% in males) and childhood conflict (contributing 17% in females versus 4% in males). Conclusion: Policy makers should target a reduction in the positive contribution of SSS to depression via the implementation of programmes that improve social welfare. Given the much greater contribution to inequalities among females, these policies should target women. Policies that protect children and especially the girl child from conflict can also be useful in reducing inequalities in depression related to subjective social status during adulthood. Overall, there is need for a multi-sectoral approach to address these inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]