Accent on desire: desire and race in the production of ideological subjectivities in post-apartheid South Africa
SOURCE: Feminist Formations
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2011
TITLE AUTHOR(S): C.Soudien, H.Botsis
KEYWORDS: GOVERNANCE, IDENTITY, POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, RACE RELATIONS, TRANSFORMATION
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 7077
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/3552
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/3552
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2011
TITLE AUTHOR(S): C.Soudien, H.Botsis
KEYWORDS: GOVERNANCE, IDENTITY, POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, RACE RELATIONS, TRANSFORMATION
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 7077
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/3552
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/3552
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
Understanding the transformation of South African institutions requires taking into account the ways in which category maintenance and transgression operate in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the official ideology of the post-apartheid government being one of no racialism, there are still incongruent messages about identity from all quarters, which learners have to negotiate. We consider how this negotiation is managed through examining South Africans' English accents as a terrain of desire upon which ideological (gendered, raced) subjectivities are formed. We argue that desire is deeply invested in the psycho-social complex of what being white and black is assumed to stand for. Currently, South Africans can deviate from the identity descriptions attributed to them or to which they will attach themselves; however, this deviation involves both transgression and category-maintenance work that simultaneously enables and constrains the (Davies 1989, 29) subject. In narrative research with young South African women (aged 16 to 24), we found that normative whiteness is re-inscribed through constructions of desire as they pertain to accent. We argue that accent acts as a "disruption [that] works at the level of [their] desire to be a particular kind of subject" (Davies 2006, 88).-
Related Research Outputs:
- Book review: Distiller, N. & Steyn, M. (eds.) 2004. Under construction: 'race' and identity in South Africa today. Sandton: Heinemann, ISBN 0796214786, 213 p
- Whose teaching whom?: interrogating subjectives in the teaching of literature in post-apartheid South Africa
- A contradictory class location?: the African corporate middle class and the burden of race in South Africa
- Race, class and housing in post-apartheid Cape Town
- Democracy and governance review: Mandela's legacy 1994-1999
- Consolidating democracy and governance in South Africa
- Governance and institutional trust in South Africa: November 1999-September 2000
- Facts, fiction and fabrication?: service delivery in South Africa under Mandela
- Perception of service and infrastructure under President Mbeki
- Identity? Theory, politics, history
- Developing the culture of governance and democracy in South Africa, 1994-1999
- The state of local government: third-generation issues
- Government's changing reponses to HIV/AIDS
- State-civil society in post-apartheid South Africa
- Where are we ten years later?: the complexity of South African education transition
- Foreword
- Conversation with a nation: race and redress in South Africa
- Overcoming the legacy of discrimination in South Africa: final report
- Globalization issues of identity and the implications for governance and democratization in the post-apartheid South Africa
- Introduction: about life after presidency