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Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Linzi Manicom
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.

The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.

Type
Gender and State in the History of South Africa
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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4 Participants at a conference on Women and Gender in Southern Africa at the University of Natal in January 1991 raised, as a political problem, the preponderance of white women amongst South African feminist academics (author's observation).

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46 State theorists have variously accounted for the relationship between that which is formally acknowledged as ‘the state’ and the more extensive domain of ruling: Gramsci with his notion of hegemony, Althusser's ‘ideological state apparatuses’, Foucault's understanding of the dispersion and varieties of disciplinary power. See Lorna Weir's discussion of this point in ‘Studies in the medicalization of sexual danger: sexual rule, sexual politics, 1830–1930’ (Ph.D. thesis, York University, Toronto, 1986), 1323.Google Scholar

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55 It is perhaps unfair to judge a body of work-in-progress on the basis of its published prospectus only, but it remains striking and indicative of a particular perception of the significance of gender that Chanock, when discussing common law, mentions criminal law, labour law and constitutional law but refers to only the systematic racial differentiation and discrimination in these forms, not those of gender, and also makes no reference to what is called ‘family law’ where patriarchal relations were so obviously constructed.

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The masculine abstractions of ‘the white man’ and ‘the black man’ remain the official and everyday terms in which central relations of governance and subjection are signified in South Africa today. The collectivities ‘migrant workers’ and ‘urban blacks’ might appear to be gender-neutral, but their masculinity becomes apparent when women are invoked as a special condition or a designated relation – ‘female migrants’, ‘and his wife’, ‘women-headed households’.

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60 I am here referring particularly to the work of Ashforth and to that of Martin Chanock as set out in his ‘Prospectus’. There is an increasing body of unpublished work that is exploring similar approaches.

61 Corrigan, Philip, ‘State formation (entry for a dictionary)’, in Social Forms/Human Capacities (London/New York, 1990), 264Google Scholar. This refocusing reflects the influence of Foucault's approach to analysing power; see particularly ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry, xiii (1982), 777–95Google Scholar; ‘Questions of method’, Ideology and Consciousness, vii (1981), 314Google Scholar; and ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, vi (1979), 521Google Scholar. A similar concern with the way in which governance is achieved is found in Dorothy E. Smith's elaboration of the concept ‘relations of rule’ where she looks at the textual mediation of social organization and forms of ruling; see The Conceptual Practices of Power (London, 1990)Google Scholar and Texts, Facts and Femininity (Toronto, 1990).Google Scholar

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63 Krikler, in his review, does point to the intellectual tradition of socialist feminism as constituting ‘one of the vital and original components of the social science of the South African Left’ (p. 16), but he gives no indication of how that tradition might be disturbing previous paradigms of historical interpretation. My review has suggested that the socialist feminist tradition has, in the past, tended to be confined largely to inserting women into the historical picture and benignly incorporating their histories into the prevailing marxist theory.