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Copyright of Critical African Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we share some personal reflections of straddling different research roles in a doctoral study entitled Queering Sex Work and Mobility in South Africa. We highlight the importance of using a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) methodology when conducting studies with migrant and mobile sex workers as it offers participants an opportunity to express their lived realities and embodied knowledge(s) beyond linguistic barriers. Through our reflections, we demonstrate that marginalised communities can become co-creators in knowledge production processes, not just the givers of stories (aka 'poverty porn') but integral members of the research team who actively contribute towards the conceptualisation, data collection, analysis, publishing and distribution of scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa faces several massive, interconnected challenges that reverberate through its political economy, society and education system. This paper offers lessons for the current conjuncture by exploring radical democracy and educational experiments in two other contexts: Brazil, as a point of close comparison, and Rojava (northern Syria), as a point for dissimilar comparison but which offers a "real utopia". The Brazilian student movement (2015–16) involved several waves of mass school occupations in the "student spring" (primavera secundarista), with students demanding free, quality public education and, within the occupations, experimenting with democratic, dialogical, caring educational spaces. The Revolution in Rojava, emerging in 2012 and continuing to date, offers an alternative model of social organisation guided by women's liberation, ecological harmony, and "Democratic Confederalism", a form of anti-capitalist radical democracy. It has provided fertile ground for a profoundly different education system from the statist, authoritarian models previously imposed in the region. This paper draws out several prominent themes from each context, drawing these into conversation with the contemporary South African context. First, the movements demonstrate the pedagogical importance of language and culture, history and social dynamics, the decommodification of education, feminism and ecology. Second, they highlight the political importance of education for self-organisation in relation to broader processes of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has a patriarchal tendency to treat womxn as beneficiaries of protest and activism rather than as agents in the construction of a new socio-political order and as drivers of change through protest. This paper examines the internal gender tensions within South Africa's 2015-2016 student movements including how these tensions materialised publicly; in a sample of university campuses and in the media. The complex particularities of young black womxn who are agitating for an intersectional approach to protest - one that privileges gender - and an end to patriarchy and misogynoir in these movements is observed. Content analysis of self-articulated goals, mission statements on various media and case studies are detailed where black womxn activists constitute majority membership in movements even as they remain disenfranchised in their operationalising. To counter marginality, black womxn student activists' interventions demonstrate a new radical political autonomy that embraces an inclusive feminist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education is understood to play a critical role in ongoing processes of social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa through the production of graduates who are critical and engaged citizens. A key challenge is that institutions of higher education are themselves implicated in reproducing the very hierarchies they hope to transform. In this paper, I reflect critically on my experiences of a course aimed at transforming teaching through transforming teachers. In this paper, I foreground my own positionality as a white female educator as I draw on feminist theorising to reflect on my experiences as a learner in the Community, Self and Identity course. I suggest that we need to teach in ways that are more cognisant of the complexities of the constraints on personal freedom in the past if we are to contribute to the development of social justice in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dawn of democracy in 1994 ushered in a period of radical change in the higher education sector of South Africa. This rupture represented an opportunity to avoid the replication of patriarchally informed, racially charged, neoliberal practices. More than twenty years later under the banner of Fees Must Fall, students, workers, and academics challenged the exclusionary, racist, exploitative and sexist nature of Higher Learning Institutions that have persisted since this transition from apartheid. In this paper, we reiterate a tested argument in (South) African feminist scholarship by proposing that to fulfil this goal towards transformation and change in and across HLIs, a critical starting point is to use feminist theories to deconstruct parochial, patriarchal ideologies. We review some of the key arguments that various feminists have put forth in relation to meaningfully transforming institutional cultures and pedagogies, ranging from anti-apartheid feminisms to more contemporary, intersectional feminisms and further argue that the neoliberalisation of HLIs, manifested in the capturing of private markets within the education sector, and practices of output-based productivity measurements that create bedrocks of racially charged epistemic exclusions, echo hierarchical patriarchal elements that are remnants of colonialism and apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central theme that dominates most studies on gender and leadership in education is the emerging tendency towards mitigating pervasive forms of discrimination against females. Yet, women still remain, for the most part, a minority within leadership positions in education. Despite policy initiatives emphasising gender equity, discrimination, prejudice and stereotyping continue to perpetuate the myth of women's submissiveness and remain a redoubtable barrier for impeding women in acquiring leadership positions. The awareness of gender politics combined with challenges related to gender equity in organisations remain a thorny concern in education circles. This paper examines the barriers South African women experience. A qualitative approach was employed using a post-colonial feminist perspective. Findings indicate that stereotypes concerning female inadequacy as leaders persist and act to distort perceptions of male and female performance and potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a particular event in South African history and the ways in which the event is memorialised and remembered in post-apartheid South Africa. In her book History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Annie Coombes remarks, 'Women's vital role in the overthrow of the apartheid state has been sorely neglected in favour of a more monolithic representation of the liberation movement'.1 In this paper I consider Coombes's claim in relation to one specific attempt at public memorial after apartheid: the Monument to the Women of South Africa located at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. As the only commemorative site dedicated entirely to women's apartheid-era political efforts, the Monument to the Women of South Africa is of vital importance to the memory of women's role in the struggle; and yet a tension exists between the monument's presence as a feminist site, and its disappearance from public view: the Monument has essentially been invisible to the public for most of its existence, due in part to the inaccessibility of the Union Buildings. The Monument's invisibility not only trivialises the political significance of the Women's March, but is also a distressing act of post-apartheid erasure of women's political agency. I argue that when one considers this alongside the more widespread exclusion of women in post-apartheid commemorative sites, this not only has implications for the telling of history, but may very well affect women's ability, in Cynthia Enloe's words, to 'sustain an authentic political life in post-war periods'.2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's disability grant is critical for the survival of many disabled people and their families, and is especially important to disabled women, who face further disadvantage because of their family responsibilities, their generally deeper poverty and their greater vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and other illnesses. Valuable engagement between feminism and disability theory offers a useful framework for understanding the needs of disabled women in South Africa's social assistance system. This paper sets out the findings of a study of the disability grant system in two provinces in South Africa. It discusses the administrative problems with the system and the financial and other costs that burden the grant applicants and beneficiaries. It proposes that a comprehensive response to poverty, disability and gender inequality is needed, and makes specific recommendations for an improved system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Culture, Health & Sexuality is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi, has been neglected by African feminist commentary, probably because of its radicalism. 20th-century African feminisms, under different names and descriptions, generally advocated a moderate approach to gender relations, refusing to exclude or stigmatize men. However, a change is underway in the attitudes of younger African feminists, especially in South Africa, as the recent #MenAreTrash and #AmINext hashtags and protests about rape culture have demonstrated. The protagonist of Saadawi's novel, Firdaus, who discovers her true vocation in the action of killing a man, matches and outstrips the anger of these younger feminists. So radical is Woman at Point Zero that it appears to advocate androcide as a response to patriarchy, which, to Firdaus, represents multiple types of abuse and injustice, including capitalism. This paper explores degrees of feminist radicalism as well as developments in African feminist thought, before considering Woman at Point Zero as an example of the radical extreme whose time may have come. The novel exists, if not as a provocation to direct action, at least as a terrible warning to men – and members of other genders – and hence as a trigger of radical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores artistic and activist work that has arisen in response to episodes of violence committed by the apartheid state against anti-apartheid activists. More specifically, it considers representations of suffering in South Africa's public sphere through a comparison of two post-apartheid commemorative spaces: the Johannesburg Central Police Station (formerly John Vorster Square) and a memorial by artist Kagiso Pat Mautloa that is positioned there, and the Johannesburg Women's Jail at constitution Hill. Mautloa's memorial is part of the important Sunday Times Heritage Project, and it commemorates the torture and imprisonment of political detainees. The transformation of the Women's Jail into an activist and artistic space was curated by Churchill Madikida, Lauren Segal and Clive van den Berg. Through an analysis of these two spaces, I consider some of the tensions that arise in representing trauma and suffering in the public sphere and issues that arise from such tensions. How do artistic commemorations of trauma put viewers in the position of bearing witness to and upholding the memory of traumatic pasts? What is the most effective, or respectful, way to memorialise suffering? To what extent can visual culture help promote healing, recovery, and social change? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the 23rd biennial conference of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), "The Past and Its Possibilities: Perspectives of Southern Africa," held in Durban, South Africa from June 27-29, 2011, is presented. Topics discussed at the conference include African feminism, heroism in South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, and solidarity.

In the West, women's history arose amidst the women's movements of the 1970s. In developing regions such as South Africa, however, the process was delayed and early interest in women was expressed by anthropologists and sociologists. In developing regions, researching, writing, and consuming history is a luxury. This puts more pressure on choosing what to research and write about. This essay focuses on the value of studying women's history. While the subject is no longer neglected in South Africa, there are areas of women's history that have been overlooked. Interdisciplinary methods and innovative use of source material could provide the opportunity to study hidden aspects of women's lives that have been overlooked. These new approaches can challenge past assumptions and shed light on new questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of research on the discursive construction of one aspect of gender identity: the female physical ideal. Applying Butler's (1993) theory of performing to a real-life local context, it critically analyses how a group of young South African women discursively construct and perform the notion of the ideal feminine body in conversation with their female friends. Furthermore, it uses elements of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (Fairclough, 1992; 2001) to provide a linguistic analysis of the ideologies which underlie this construction. Recognising that ideologies are unstable and dynamic, it seeks to account for the ideological tensions and ambiguities in the discourses surrounding the feminine body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong feminist scholarship that examines the fraught relationship between feminism and nationalism. The African National Congress (ANC) stands out as a nationalist movement that has gone further than most in transcending the tendency of nationalist organisations to reinforce women's status as secondary political subjects. Yet there has been little analytical attention to how the ANC operates as a political organisation. This article addresses this issue from the perspective of the ANC in exile and women active within it. Drawing on archival research and interviews, the article pays close attention to the workings of the ANC as a political organisation. It excavates the debates on feminism and autonomy within the ANC, and seeks to understand how feminist demands impacted on processes of organisational democratisation. The article identifies three categories of influence on the increasing assertion of women's interests within the ANC. The first relates to internal organisational experiences, and the second to the theoretical debates that flowed from attempts to find a role for women in national liberation. The third influence was ANC women's exposure to, and interaction with, international feminist debates and with women's organisations in post-independence African countries. These influences not only helped re-shape the ANC as a political organisation but also the nature of democracy instituted after the collapse of the apartheid system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the effect of National Qualifications Framework on the terrain for the redress of gender inequality in South Africa. Utilization of feminist policy; Need to create a redress oriented system of education and training; Failure of the human capital foundation of the NQF to account the ability of outcomes-based education.

Copyright of Culture, Health & Sexuality is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For lesbians, "coming out" or disclosing one's sexual orientation has come to be seen as a marker of self-acceptance, actualization, and the imperative first step in the authentication of a liberated subjectivity and social identity. However, other critical schools of thought, largely informed by Foucault's middle writings, have argued that "coming out" is merely a confessional response to an incitement to discourse about sex. This study explored constructions of coming out by a group of self-identified lesbians in South Africa. Data were collected via eight semistructured interviews and subjected to discourse analysis. Although the comingout stories appear to conform to some discursive practices characterizing confessional modes of response to incitements to speak, they are also de-emphasized as central to the constitution of selfhood. The changing conditions of possibility for the production of sexual subjectivity in contemporary South Africa seem to disrupt understandings of coming out as either solely a confessional or liberatory practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Culture, Health & Sexuality is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In South African society, the custom of bridewealth [in Zulu:ilobolo] is widely upheld, although its current practice may constrain marriage in African society. The custom is persistent particularly in South African Zulu society and has been understood as symbolising a man’s masculinity and role as economic provider. In this article, we focus on how a sample of Zulu women views bridewealth, and on the role that women play in the practice and maintenance of the custom. Drawing from extensive qualitative data recently collected in KwaZulu-Natal, we illustrate how the women in our study construct multifaceted femininities throughilobolo.The custom sustains a widely desired and respected notion of womanhood based on “traditional” conceptions of Zulu female propriety, dignity and cultural pride. Socio-economic considerations and complex gendered power dynamics also explain why women actively contribute to upholding the custom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When land grabs are viewed from a gendered and historical lens, critical questions arise concerning three domains of inquiry about what is arguably “new,” “foreign,” and “large-scale?” They highlight historical continuities from the colonial past elite and male capture and gendered micro-political land grabs unabated over long periods of time, which once aggregated across Sub-Saharan Africa, are large-scale in themselves. This contribution reflects on feminist political-ecological research on gender and land in Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar and provides windows into negotiations and contestations in processes of land grabs. It analyzes what is new, while considering relations of power and knowledge that shape different ways land grabs are named and, therefore, the kinds of actions that are subsequently prescribed. Land grabs are occurring in spite of strong laws and policies, illustrating the critical role of power relations in shaping them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite apparent feminist advancements within contemporary South Africa, gender transformation in the media industry has been both limited and irregular. Based on interviews with journalists and editors from three weekly newspapers -- the Sunday Times, the Sunday Sun and the Mail & Guardian -- this article explores how journalists articulate their understandings of gender and gender transformation within the media, and reflects on how these articulations draw on wider feminist discourses in South Africa. While journalists express an engagement with feminist thought and advocacy around the media, this is largely limited to liberal feminist discourses with an emphasis on women's inclusion in the media. The limitations of this discourse have implications for the kinds of gender transformation occurring within the news media, and it is argued that the advancement of a 'progressive' feminist lens can contribute towards more comprehensive gender transformation within the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the ultimate purpose of critical engagement with black men and masculinities is the development of progressive masculinities, the growing body of scholarly, pedagogical and media-related work on men and masculinities in South Africa has reached a dead end – or something close to it. This article employs three media pieces as springboards to highlight the currency of the topicality of masculinity, but, crucially too, the apparent gaps in how black South African masculinities are thought of, in order to respond to how work on men and masculinities can negotiate itself out of the current impasse. While the article is anchored in the phenomenon of masculinity as a media headline issue, it is not an exhaustive analysis of the prevalent discourses of black masculinity conveyed by the media. The article argues that, in the context of the enduring power of monist theories and politics of men's and blacks’ lives, (re)engaging black and African feminisms for black men, alongside critical black thought, might be precisely what is needed to ‘make the black man come to himself’ as Biko put it, and towards liberating black masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The post-apartheid South African Constitution requires that the judiciary be transformed ‘to reflect broadly the racial and gender composition of South Africa’. Because the legal system and the judiciary are the least ‘transformed’ organs of government and because of their social and political significance, the appointment of judges has become an important avenue for South Africans to continue to contest issues of race and power, usually using codes such as ‘merit’ or ‘transformation’ but sometimes descending into more open racial hostility. This article examines the debate around the appointment in 2011 of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng in which his views and judgments on gender and sexual orientation have been widely used to bolster the argument that he was not fit to be appointed. While gender and sexual orientation was raised almost universally, certain of these criticisms used gender in ways which echoed and amplified historical stereotypes of black men in general, and African male sexuality in particular. In these debates gender became a proxy for race because of the way in which discourses around gender echoed racial themes and stereotypes which have predominated in popular debates around the judiciary. In addition, ‘gender arguments’ were used to strengthen claims that professional seniority should be the main criterion in judicial appointments – a factor which would clearly favour white men in a profession in which black people and women remain a minority This placed feminists in an invidious position by using feminist arguments to justify racial privilege while subverting or ignoring more systemic gender and racial inequalities within the largely untransformed legal profession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers specific cultural productions by South Africa-based artists Nandipha Mntambo and Shelley Barry, and discusses how their representations subvert hegemonic identity constructions, providing an alternative language about personhood and identity. Using a feminist intersectional analysis that connects gender, race, ability, sexuality and species, the article discusses moments of cultural production that imagine non-violent possibilities for reconstructing personhood. Through textual analysis, I engage the artists' work by unpacking what constitutes desirable personhood, acceptable bodies and the human subject in a post-colonial context, arguing that these alternatives allow for possibilities of becoming and being subjects that move outside of violent identity norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 'gender was seldom explicitly invoked as a lens into human rights abuse or an organizing principle for the commission's work' (Nesiah et al., 2006, p. 3). In this respect the TRC is a trailblazer, as subsequent truth commissions in other countries have been inspired to incorporate the gender component. The study of the TRC, however, is relatively under-theorized from the feminist perspective. This article argues that the feminist perspective offers a nuanced scrutiny of narrative and truth, two major themes of the TRC. The feminist inquiry helps resurrect 'listening', as a crucial component of narratives. In addition, the value of the feminist perspective lies in its ability to throw light on the experience of both women and men and to create an argument and language for the articulation of the needs of the powerless and dispossessed in society. A feminist critique of truth and reconciliation commissions has the potential to make the transitional justice mechanism more inclusive and democratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main premise of this article is that sexualities studies can be strengthened through intense international exchanges among countries located in the South. We highlight this finding through a methodological exploration of an international South-South research-action project carried out within academic settings in Argentina, Chile, China, Mexico, and South Africa. Our main contributions are the way in which the combined use of virtual networking, inclusive leadership, and participatory methodologies resulted in intense academic exchange. Specifically, attentiveness to local concerns and realities was a key methodological decision based in the adaptation of the original protocol. In turn, these lead to curricula renovation, community building, and the strengthening of networks. Our conclusions are that sexualities studies remain fragile but are visible, multiple, and decentralized. Additionally, funding by international organizations remains critical to move forward. Given that this is a unique project—thus no other empirical evidence supports the argument presented here—we emphasize the importance of testing this model both within the field of sexualities studies and its possible applications to different fields of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the testimonial significance of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera's work by considering the extent to which their choice of literary fiction facilitates and enables the urgent political and social intervention that their texts undertake. Their work responds to the violence in the Zimbabwean and South African contexts from and about which they write. This violence, which is a recurring theme in their work, is physical as well as psychic and results in traumatized individual and collective identities that pose particular challenges to representation. The role that the witness to trauma plays is an active one that carries its own responsibility. The onus that rests on the witness is related to the traumatic nature of what is being testified to. The article provides a detailed exploration of the dynamics that are involved in the process of witnessing trauma. Since traumatic events cause an overflow of the cognitive system, it is not comprehensively experienced by the victims at the time when it occurs. It can only be fully 'known' in the aftermath of the event and then when it is being received by an empathetic listener (or reader). Vera and Krog use literature to enable the reader to endure the pain and difficulty that come with being an active participant in the creation of new knowledge when that knowledge concerns a traumatic event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the female narration from the essay of South African author, JM Coetzee in relation to postcolonial feminist debate. The author mentions that feminist critics who theorise issues in terms of the postcolonial are speaking from and for nonwhite African women. He argues that this double bind of race and gender creates conflicts with white South African women who are caught between the two systems of patriarchal situation. The author believes that this conflict serves to silence the South African feminist agenda as seen in the Coetzee's female narrators.

Although there has been a greater attentiveness to gender as an ideological representation in postapartheid criticism, how the nation relies on the visual to manage gender and construct racialised gender identities is still a developing conversation. This article situates the shifting location of 'woman' through a comparative reading of the aporias created between two published versions of Longlive! by Menan du Plessis, an excerpt published by a feminist press (1987) and the finalised version of the novel (1989). Using feminist film theory's analysis of the gaze as a tool, my reading examines the role of looking relations in reinforcing the hegemony of white privilege through an analysis of how the male imperial gaze structures the subjectivity of white daughters for the nation. Through re-presenting and disrupting the male imperial gaze in her depiction of these daughters, Du Plessis's late-apartheid era texts offer sites for developing post-apartheid feminist frameworks sensitive to lingering power differentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In J. K. Gibson-Graham's The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), the authors (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) provocatively deploy queer theory to further their project of telling non-capitalist stories of globalization. In short, they reject the narrative that globalization is always and only penetrative in the hope that global capital will 'lose its erection' and 'other openings' in the body of capitalism can be considered. I adopt their strategy of looking at stories of globalization. But, while they are concerned with the homophobia of economic theorizing, I consider the gay-friendly discourse of post-apartheid South Africa. Recent expressions of official tolerance by various nation-states around the globe have been dismissed as the mere appropriation of difference by hegemonic forces. Against such interpretations, I look at the ways in which the inclusion of 'sexual orientation' in post-apartheid South Africa's constitutional Equality Clause can instead be read as a queer globalization. Based on this reading, I problematize the presumption that queer globalizations take place beyond the realm of the hegemonic and point to the need for queer theorists to think through the political ramifications of homosexuality's repositioning as saviour rather than scapegoat of certain nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extent to which the courts and legal processes have been engaged to address the gendered social and economic inequalities in South Africa. It thus explores the role of the courts in extending or limiting the rights of women, especially through the right to equality. It is argued that courts were not the main site for rights claims, especially in the early years of democracy, as feminist policy advocates preferred to advocate for rights through political processes. However, as the opportunities for change through political means slowed down, there was increasing reliance on the courts. Drawing on feminist theory of the law, the article examines the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion created by the two superior courts, the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal, as well as their mechanisms of responsiveness and resistance to women's rights claims. It concludes by suggesting that both these courts have made significant rhetorical advances within rights discourse, with some potentially transformative judgements. The courts have begun to redraw some of the social boundaries of inclusion to extend rights protection to the private sphere and to a wider set of relationships. This has begun to dislodge some traditional understandings of gender relations. However, the Constitutional Court, for a range of reasons, has also set clear limitations to this, which ultimately reinforce traditional gender relations. Despite this, there remains significant space for using litigation as a strategy for change, especially if it is embedded in wider political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, a country in which the manipulation of ethnicity was at the heart of the government's attempts to establish control over the majority African population, ethnic mobilization during the liberation struggle was singularly unsuccessful. The one exception was Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's controversial Inkatha movement. This article suggests that one of the reasons for Inkatha's successes was the astute way in which the organization and, in particular. Buthelezi played on gendered notions of `home' and homeland'. Historically, apartheid constructed notions of home and space differently for women and men and Inkatha was able to draw upon and manipulate these differences to produce a powerfully felt response. Thus, for men, many of them migrant workers in South Africa's cities, the notion of tome' implied a return to patriarchal values and male domestic control in a historically constituted homeland'; for women, Buthelezi emphasized the new `modern' opportunities opened up by the KwaZulu homeland, and the importance of their God-given' gifts of motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]