'There's got to be a man in there': reading intersections between gender, race and sexuality in South African magazines
SOURCE: African Identities
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008
TITLE AUTHOR(S): N.Sanger
KEYWORDS: GENDER EQUALITY, HOMOSEXUALITY, IDENTITY, MAGAZINES, MEDIA SECTOR, RACIAL SEGREGATION, SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR
DEPARTMENT: Developmental, Capable and Ethical State (DCES)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 5436
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/5250
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/5250
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008
TITLE AUTHOR(S): N.Sanger
KEYWORDS: GENDER EQUALITY, HOMOSEXUALITY, IDENTITY, MAGAZINES, MEDIA SECTOR, RACIAL SEGREGATION, SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR
DEPARTMENT: Developmental, Capable and Ethical State (DCES)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 5436
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/5250
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/5250
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
The aim of this article is to interrogate the ways that compulsory heteropatriarchy establishes women's representation as hyper(hetero)sexual in a select group of South African mainstream magazines. In men's magazines targeting both black and white male readers, women are depicted as objects for an unnamed and unmarked, but clearly, masculine audience. In contrast, women's magazines with a dominant white female readership, sexualize black femininities for the consumption of white female readers in ways reminiscent of white male colonial obsession with black bodies. Using a feminist methodology foregrounding the intersectionalities between gender, race and sexuality, I argue that hyper(hetero)feminine performances are racialized with few exceptions:, white femininities are depicted as normative, and black femininities as different and exotic. If heteronormativity and white normalcy determines women's representation in the popular media, a space which relies on repetition in order to establish normativity in the popular imagination, then the struggle for women's bodily integrity, freedom and equality, needs to be more aggressively pursued in the current post-colonial South African climate.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Feminist intellectual activism: within and beyond the academy: constructions of 'whiteness', gender and sexuality in South African magazines
- Masculine bodies, feminine symbols: challenging gendered identities or compulsory femininity?
- Magazine editors, objectivity and neutrality
- Unnamed men and available women: connecting the popular, the personal and the political in racialised hyperheterosexual representations of women in South African magazines
- Gender, power and resistance to change among two communities in the Western Cape, South Africa
- Taking research and prevention forward
- New women, old messages?: constructions of femininities, race and hypersexualised bodies in selected South African magazines, 2003-2006
- Constructs of identity and HIV risk behaviours among men who have sex with men (MSM) in two South African cities
- Book review: Reddy, V., Sandfort, T., Rispel, L. (eds). 2009. From social silence to social science: same-sex sexuality, HIV & AIDS and gender in South Africa: conference proceedings. Cape Town: HSRC Press. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7969-2276-2
- Being straight and being gay: identity or multiple desire: the case of South Africa
- (B)order(s) Aids review 2011
- After-nine, 429, he-she, stabane, and gay, bisexual and other 'men sleeping with men': diversity in black South African MSM identities and implications for HIV prevention
- "Gays have money": the gendered nature and meanings of transactional sex among black men who have sex with men in South Africa
- Safely queer on the urban peripheries of Cape Town: a comparative study exploring how 'class' mediates the possibilities and opportunities to reinvent identities for gender non-conforming youth on the urban peripheries of Cape Town in South Africa
- Book review: Morgan, R., Marais, C. and Wellbeloved, J.R. 2009. Trans: transgender life stories form South Africa. Auckland Park: Jacana Media. ISBN 9781920196226
- Race and sexual desire in the construction of identities: agency, race, gender, and desire in Zef music
- Safely queer on the urban peripheries of Cape Town: a summary
- African same-sex sexualities and gender-diversity: an introduction
- Layered stigma and HIV/AIDS: experiences of men who have sex with men (MSM) in South Africa
- The meanings of sex: men who sex with men (MSM)