Womanity-Talk



PROGRAM DATE:2020-09-17PROGRAM NAME: WOMANITY – WOMEN IN UNITYGUEST NAME: DR. NADINE LAKE – DIRECTOR OF GENDER STUDIES PROGRAMME AT THE CENTRE FOR GENDER AND AFRICA STUDIES – UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATESPEAKERTRANSCRIPTIONDR. MALKA Hello, I’m Dr.Amaleya Goneos-Malka, welcome to ‘Womanity– Women in Unity’. The show that celebrates prominent and ordinary African Women’s milestone achievements in their struggles for liberation, self-emancipation, human rights, democracy, racism, socio-economic class division and gender based violence.DR. MALKAJoining us on the line today from the Free State, is Dr. Nadine Lake, who is the Director of the Gender Studies Programme in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of The Free State. Dr. Lake it’s a pleasure to have you on the air and I must say you are the first representative that we’ve had from the University of The Free State, so welcome to the show!DR. LAKEThank you Amaleya, it’s such a pleasure to be with you today and especially in Women’s Month as well, August being Women’s Month, so I’m glad to be representing the Free State in this way.DR. MALKAAs we’re in Women’s Month and we’re having this period of reflection as well as celebration and looking forwards to the opportunity, I think that having the director of a Centre for Gender and Africa Studies is very prudent. So, to start with, can you tell us more about the centre’s focus?DR. LAKEYes sure, so the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of The Free State offers postgraduate academic programmes in Gender and Africa studies. These programmes are interdisciplinary in nature and they provide students with an opportunity to specialise in one of these fields. So our centre focuses primarily on research, teaching and community engagement projects and I’ve been the director of Gender Studies at the centre since 2011. In our programmes we also teach students about the cross-cutting nature of gender in different aspects such as work, culture, tradition, development and sexuality, just to name a few areas. The centre also invites experts in the field of gender studies, both locally and internationally and some of our guest speakers over the past few years have included South African activist and artist Zanele Muholi and we also invite experts on sexuality and gender issues such as the author and academic on female masculinity and transgender issues Jack Halberstam.DR. MALKAThanks for sharing some of the dynamics in the centre’s focus, so through community work as well as research and you highlighted some of the topics; gender and work, gender and tradition, gender and development and I think one of the areas that I found quite interesting when I was reviewing the programmes was Feminist Theory, comparing Western Feminism and African feminism. So if you could share with us a little bit more about or unpack some of the aspects that people learn in these programmes, what the course content is, the types of concepts that are introduced?DR. LAKEYes, so the Feminist Theory for example, Feminist Theory is definitely a foundational course which is offered in the Centre For Gender and Africa Studies and with Feminist Theory we encourage our students to think about these theories within an African and Western context. I think that one of the most fundamental issues is that we teach students that there’s no single definition of feminism, but that there are multiple feminisms that have developed over time. So, Feminist Theory in particular, focuses on the important strides that have been made by Western and African feminists in fighting for issues such as equal pay for equal work, the right to vote, sexual and bodily integrity and freedom and also counter-arguments to the idea that Western feminism can speak to the oppression in the lives of African women. So also with Feminist Theory we move beyond a focus on theory, but we also concentrate on some of the feminist approaches that can be applied within social sciences, so we incorporate feminist standpoint theory for example, which challenges the idea of a normative status of patriarchal and capitalist societies and which encourages researches to reconsider the way in which we think about reality. So really by prioritising the voices and the lived experiences of women and in this I think that one of the major contributing theories has also been inter-sectionality theory, which is a major contribution to gender studies in the 20th and 21st centuries, because it amplifies the multiple forms of oppression that have historically silenced women’s social, political and their economic voice. We also include a few other courses in gender studies such as Gender and Work, which focuses on gender sensitive policies in organisations, so here learners are provided with both theoretical and practical tools to develop gender sensitive policies. So we focus on the patriarchal nature of institutions in higher education, in the corporate sector and we also look at challenges such as the ‘glass ceiling’ phenomenon, where women are prevented from advancing in their respective careers and Gender and Work also includes discussions on the importance of female mentors for women’s advancement in the work environment. So these are just some of the courses that are presented on our gender studies programme.DR. MALKAAs a woman, personally, I’ve been touched by all of these components and I think that many other women have as well. They are very practical aspects and require more intervention to take place in society, whether that is in family structures or in the workplace itself. How are you seeing the learnings or the students being able to take this knowledge and put it into effect, put it into practice in their respective areas of work?DR. LAKEThat’s an important question and I think it really speaks to the way in which our societies have changed today also. I think previously gender studies, even in the early 2000’s, was an unknown concept; I remember on numerous occasions where people used to ask me what do you study and in response I would say Gender Studies and they would think that it’s something in the medical field. So, I think that the discourse has changed considerably around gender studies and that it’s become common discourse in South African homes now, speaking to the issue of gender based violence for example, which our president has recently alluded to as a very serious issue and even a pandemic in South Africa. So, within what we teach our students is really to think about power relations in societies and the way in which that impacts us in our work environment, the ways in which that impacts us within the private sphere and within the domestic environment and to think of policies and to think of modes of being with each other that can challenge inequalities in society and I think that in South Africa in particular we’ve seen that non-profit organisations have done very important work in terms of challenging some of the gender norms and the socialisation that can reproduce these inequalities. So, there are already very important institutions and organisations such as the Commission for Gender Equality, which is holding institutions accountable to enforcing advancement of women in organisations, in higher education and really looking at the equal status quo between men and women in society.DR. MALKAWe had an interesting conversation recently with Professor Gillian Drennan, who is Head of Geosciences at Wits University and linking into this, she was talking about the multi-disciplinary nature of science and incorporating a module on entrepreneurship and you might say well why am I saying this, but my point here is that listening to everything you’ve said, that we should be looking at gender studies as a multi-disciplinary approach which should be incorporated into other fields of study so that when people leave the academic institutions, they have developed some gender sensitivity, they understand these concepts and can manifest them as they go out into the workplace.DR. LAKEI definitely agree with that and I think that it also speaks to some of the issues that we deal with in Gender and Development for example, where it’s really important to look at a gender perspective on development issues in different countries and on the continent and so Gender and Development also foregrounds the disparity impact that globalisation and economic development has on people, especially for women, based on their gender, their class backgrounds, social location and their socio-political identities and so Gender and Development facilitates an understanding of how these global processes impact negatively on women’s lives and the importance of developing policies that integrate women’s voices and their needs in the development approach and I think that this has been one of the fundamental contributions of Gender and Women’s studies, is to really reflect on how the world and how our reality has been shaped by largely a masculinist view of the world. So really to try to reconstruct society from a different perspective; how can we bring about the voices of those who have been marginalised historically, how can we start to re-imagine a future where those who are more vulnerable in society, in particular women, in order to challenge some of the inequalities that we are facing economically, socially and politically in contemporary times.DR. MALKAAnd that draws attention to the inter-sectionality theory that you described earlier. When we opened the line we were speaking about August as being Women’s Month and a period to reflect on achievements as well as highlight the gaps of where we still need to make more inroads to developing change. This year’s theme is Generation Equality- Realising Women’s Rights For An Equal Future and we spoke about President Cyril Ramaphosa in terms of his viewpoint of not tolerating gender based violence, which is a pandemic in South Africa currently, and looking to ways of alleviating things. This year on Women’s Day, President Ramaphosa announced four important actions. Action One is to expand access of women to economic opportunities, Action Two; to support women who operate small or micro businesses, including the informal sector; Action Three is to speed up the process of giving women access to productive assets such as land. Action Four is to ensure that women are safe from gender based violence in the workplace. Given your expertise in the gender field and the research that you’ve been developing; how do you see these actions materialising?DR. LAKEI think that that is very important to reflect on both the gains and the path that we still need to endeavour on to be able to materialise some of these actions which the president has made reference to and I think it’s very important that the president has made this announcement because despite it being women’s month, speaking about gender issues in our country and I think that a lot of the time people are speaking about gender based violence and the disparity impact that this has on women, but there are numerous other socio-economic challenges in society that also need to be addressed and so I think I’ll just start by looking at some of the gains that we have already made in society and some of these gains also include an increased number of women in decision-making positions in both government and corporate sector. I think that that is a very positive move with reference to women’s advancement in their careers and so at the beginning a democratic era in South Africa, in 1993, we for instance saw that women in domestic labour and the unskilled farm work were being paid 21% less than their male counterparts in equivalent positions and today, since 2015 onwards, we see that the wage gap has actually been reduced to 7%, so that is a positive move in terms of the gains that we have made.DR. MALKAThat’s definitely an important gain and it’s something which honestly has really frustrated me, how can I be doing the same job as a male counterpart and be paid less for it.DR. LAKEYes and it really is, you know, still totally confounding to think that women and men can be paid less for equal work and it’s something that really needs attention in South Africa, so I think that through democratic principles and through agitating for equality, we are starting to see a change in society, but I think that even greater demands need to be made in terms of equality and I think that one of the very positive moves with reference to this is that women with tertiary education has also doubled since 1993 and we are seeing much higher numbers of women entering into postgraduate studies, so that is a move in the right direction. I think in terms of gender based violence as well, women have greater freedom these days to report incidents of sexual abuse and marital rape has finally been defined as a criminal offence. So the fact that South Africans are talking about and actively resisting violence definitely enables an environment where we see women are increasingly challenging an unequal status quo which is afforded to them in society.DR. MALKADo you think, on that note, that because our voices are being heard, that perhaps more people are reporting incidents and the point that I’m trying to get at here is that maybe there hasn’t really been a rise in gender based violence, but there’s been a rise in the incidents of reporting?DR. LAKEI think that that, you know, this is something which has been debated in academic circles as well, is that and within the research, is it the case that people are just reporting more or is gender based violence increasing in the country, and from the research that I’ve recently learned of as well, it seems that the levels are...that levels have remained quite stable over the past couple of years, but there seems to be much more conversation taking place around gender based violence and around sexual harassment. So I think that the freedom to be able to talk about gender based violence and the consciousness raising about what gender based violence and sexual harassment actually is, is being reflected through the numbers as well and so I think that one could add that something which is invisible in society is difficult to report on. So very important to look at that relationship between how society is being opened up to speak about issues related to gender, women’s rights, equality, men’s rights and the reflection of this in terms of it being taken more seriously, possibly when women are reporting incidents of rape or sexual harassment or sexual coercion at the South African Police Services as well.DR. MALKASo we’ve looked at the economic opportunities for women on Action One and in a previous conversation with the Deputy Minister of Women we spoke about support through government, which was effectively looking at how to bring more women in the SMME and small business space and with you we’ve touched on the issue of gender based violence, looking at things from a reporting perspective and the fact that women’s voices have become stronger. One area that I am yet to look at and understand the development is how we’re able to increase the speed and the process of giving women more access to productive assets and land has been cited as one example because I think on average, and I do stand to be corrected here, women probably have 30% of land- ownership, but they are effectively the majority of working the land and I wondered if you had any perspectives or views on that point?DR. LAKEI think that these points are really important in terms of enabling greater opportunities for women to access the economy and I think that one of the fundamental ways in which South Africa needs to do that is that women need to gain equal access to primary, secondary and tertiary education. We need to start thinking about the ways in which some of the stereotypes around women’s economic contributions needs to be challenged in order for women to succeed. With reference to land tenure, that is a very important point and I think that land tenure policy frameworks can definitely increase women’s access to land. So, in reality, although women should be entitled to access land once their husband has passed away, there is often a lack of political will to ensure that women actually inherit the land. So I believe that it is time for us to start re-examining how property rights are allocated and secured and further to this it’s very important to reflect upon the fact that many women, a large majority of women, are often the primary caretakers of the family and I think that legal processes should incorporate a gender perspective which really foregrounds the lived experiences and the realities of these women that are taking care of large families and extended family members at the same time.DR. MALKAThey certainly have an unfair burden when you look at the distribution of paid versus unpaid labour. Considering the space that you’re in and your focus on gender studies and you’ve addressed challenges; looking towards the future, what do you think women need the most to benefit going forwards?DR. LAKEI think that one of the most important issues that we need to start reflecting on is that South Africa should consider adopting a feminist foreign policy which favours the voices and the rights of the most vulnerable in society. South Africa, as we know, has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world which stipulates that nobody should be discriminated against based on race, gender, class, religion, social location and even political affiliation, just to name a few of them, but I think that it has also become clear that we are one of the least equal countries in the world. In order to build a more egalitarian society I think that we really need to start helping or holding people accountable, in order to build an egalitarian society we need to hold people accountable to laws that enforce equality and for this we really require a change in attitudes on the part of society, on the part of government, the corporate sector and higher education and we have to emphasise that women’s rights be considered in the same light as those of men’s rights. Gender norms really play an influential role in perpetuating the inequalities that we experience today, so I think that through education, consciousness raising, pressure on legal processes that prioritise the voices of women and a government which reflects our democratic principles, we will actually be able to start moving closer to this egalitarian society that we envision.DR. MALKAIt’s taking the perspective of policy, it’s implementing policy, it’s ensuring that there is also citizen responsibility to one another to uphold these views and to drive it forward so that we do develop more of a feminist society and move away from patriarchy. DR. MALKAYou are listening to ‘Womanity – Women in Unity’ on Channel Africa, the African Perspective, on frequency 9625 KHz on the 31 meter band, also available on DSTV, Channel 802. Today we’re talking to Dr. Nadine Lake who is the Director of the Gender Studies Programme in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of The Free State. We would love to receive your comments on Twitter:@Womanitytalk.DR. MALKADr. Lake, turning towards more of a personal perspective; you were awarded an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship and spent 22 months over the period of 2014 to 2016 at the Centre of Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden and with this scholarship it enabled you to complete your PhD, which was titled ‘Corrective Rape and Black Lesbian Sexualities in Contemporary South African Cultural Texts’; please tell us more about some of your findings and I would say importantly, interventions.DR. LAKEYes it was and thank you Amaleya, that was really a wonderful opportunity for me to be able to pursue my PhD studies at Uppsala University in Sweden and so with reference to the PhD study, corrective rape, I think that more people are familiar with the term now. It’s known as a phenomenon which first emerged in South Africa or was first reported on in South African newspapers in 2003 and the term itself has been used to define the rape of lesbian women by heterosexual men in an attempt to correct or cure their lesbian sexuality and this was being reported in both a local and a global context and with this study in particular I became interested in the fact that prior to 1994 there was a very low visibility as far as lesbian sexuality for black lesbian women was concerned and post 1994 we saw an emergence of their sexuality in the media, but coinciding with that was a type of spectacular violence which was being perpetrated against these women, which were primarily or are primarily from South African townships. So, the study also found that there are persistent stereotypes in the media around lesbian sexuality and the notion that homosexuality is un-African repeatedly came to the fore. So, it was particularly troubling for me to see that there’s very little diversity in terms of the representation of lesbian or queer sexuality in the South African context, the only image that one is almost met with is the idea that if you are a black lesbian woman, that there is some type of punitive punishment, a punitive justice that is in store for these women. So, on the one hand we see that black lesbians are being reported on as victims of violence with very little diversity around their sexuality, and on the other hand we saw that black men were being reported on as perpetrators of corrective rape and acting and meting out these types of punishments with impunity. So the issue was being reported on in quite a one-dimensional way and so what I did in my study was try to challenge some of the monolithic representations of black lesbians and so I searched for counter-discourses in literature and in visual activism, with a particular focus on Zanele Muholi, which aimed at debunking some of the myths and stereotypes that persist when it comes to the LGBT community in South Africa. So, some of the important interventions of the study is that I would suggest, and through my research as well, to be critical of language that reinforces these homophobic stereotypes, the notion for example that homosexuality is un-African, one needs to interrogate the idea then of what it actually means to be African and doesn’t saying that something is un-African really reinforce a conservative view on what some societies are or exist to be. Through my research as well I focused and I identified the very important role that communities and non-profit organisations were playing in fighting for LGBTQ rights and I think that it’s very important to move away from the idea that government is a single actor in combating gender based and homophobic violence. There are so many different actors, including women, the queer community, non-profit organisations, the Commission for Gender Equality and research that are challenging these one-dimensional representations of people. So, non-profit organisations for instance played a very important role in drawing attention to the issue of corrective rape and I believe that it is time that government support initiatives and recognise NGO’s knowledge and their expertise on some of these matters.DR. MALKAAnd with what you’re saying I think people will find comfort in stereotyping, that they have their own narrow views and they almost want to perpetuate those views and not believe that there’s any other way that a person can be, whether it’s about their sexuality, whether it’s about their gender, whether it’s about their belief and all of those points actually go against our constitution which embraces this inclusivity and promotes tolerance of all aspects.DR. LAKEI agree with that and I think that that is why it’s so important also to bring Africa into the debate of gender studies as well. I think that one often sees quite a big division between debates being held in the North versus debates being held in the South around gender studies and there is a tendency to essentialise phenomena such as corrective rape, for example, to be associated as a type of third-world phenomena which is specific to Africa and so I think that it’s very important to recognise that gender studies and the study of gender relations is inherently a part of Africa and you know, with our centre for example, the Centre For Gender and Africa Studies, we really tie these two aspects together, Africa and Gender Studies, in terms of looking at the impact and the influence of that colonisation, for instance, has had on the African continent and so, you know, by focusing on historical processes such as colonisation and the long-standing history of patriarchy in Africa we see that disciplines such as gender studies and women’s studies and fighting inequality on the continent are becoming increasingly relevant in our context today.DR. MALKAWe’ve spoken about the work that you’re doing, which I think is very, very important in terms of being able to change views and create opportunities for women. Given everything that you’ve done, one of the questions that I ask all my guests on this show who’ve made tremendous achievements in their respective areas of expertise, is about some of the factors that they feel have contributed to their success, whether it is about a passion, whether it is about a particular person that motivated them or hard work. In your opinion, what would you say have been some of the key drivers for your success?DR. LAKEI think that one of the key drivers for my success, although hard work and perseverance are very important, I would definitely state that being passionate about what you do is really very important to achieving success. As I mentioned briefly earlier, when I started my postgraduate education in gender studies it was still a relatively unknown field in South Africa and one can really see how since then the situation has changed considerably and that gender studies and conversations around gender are far more commonplace in our society today. So further to that I think that it’s very important for women to recognise that they have a strong sense of intuition and if there is anything that I would say attributes or one could differentiate men and women from is that there’s a sense of intuition that women have where I believe that women need to trust that instinct to lead you to a place where you have a goal that is worth working and fighting for. I think that in addition to this I’ve also had some very strong role models in the higher education context that have helped me to develop my career as well and my experience of living in Sweden and working with female supervisors who really guided me and supported me to develop my own voice through writing, that was instrumental to my success and I really want to emphasise in a way how women’s support of each other in the corporate sector and women’s support of each other in higher education, in any sphere, is really fundamental to achieving a type of success.DR. MALKASweden sounds like a special place and I listened to what you were saying, we had Prof Tess van der Merwe who focuses on obesity on the show a while ago, we’ve also had several engagements with the former ambassador of Sweden, Cecilia Julin and they really seem to be getting things right for women.DR. LAKEThey definitely are getting things right for women and I think that this also manifests in the small things that Sweden has managed to achieve in terms of, you know, an increased number of parental leave days for both men and women. Within South Africa as well, the socialisation is still very much that women are socialised into being mothers whereas men, even if they have the opportunity to work from home initially, they would rather forfeit that to go back to work as soon as possible and I think it’s so important to challenge these historical stereotypes around men’s and women’s roles and, you know, my time spent in Sweden, just seeing so many men walking around with a stroller and taking care of their children was very refreshing and it’s those issues that make a difference and really challenge this very deep division between the private and the public sphere and which helps one get closer to moving towards equality in society, where we can move away from very strict roles and imaginings of what men and women ought to be and how they should be managing their lives as well.DR. MALKAYes and on that note, I mean I know that the paternity benefit has now increased from I think three days to nine days, but if you look at countries like Sweden, I think they’ve got almost a year or something like that, where between parents they can juggle their...they can divide their let’s say child leave time or child benefit time and if we don’t have policies like that in South Africa, we’ll continuously be having this view that child rearing remains the responsibility of women, because we don’t enable our men.DR. LAKEThat’s definitely true and it’s so important to challenge as well. In Sweden for example parents get more or less 365 days of parental leave, which can be shared equally or as the couple decides to do that and I think it just gives women as well an opportunity to be able to develop and advance their careers if there’s a fairer negotiation between couples in a marriage on who gets to take care of children and I think that that is something that we’ve definitely seen now in the time of Covid-19, also in higher education for example in the result of the unfair burden of looking after the children has also inevitably benefitted men in traditional family contexts as well, where they are given the opportunity or have the time to publish more while women are taking care of the children and coping with the stress of a pandemic as well as just ensuring the livelihoods of their families. So I think that it’s so important to get to a place where people are untangling and really deconstructing these roles that are so deeply imbedded in early years of socialisation around the division of roles for men and women and that that should, that greater pressure should be applied on legal...on processes of developing policy and laws that enable women to access these types of freedoms in society and to boost their career advancement as well.DR. MALKADr. Lake there is so much to unpack and I feel that we’ve only just scratched the surface. As we’re running out of time now, could you please share a few words of wisdom or inspiration that you’d like to pass onto girls and women listening to us on the continent today?DR. LAKEYes definitely. I think that one of the things that I would like to say to young women is that you really need to embrace your difference. I think in society something that I’ve seen is that people will often try to make you conform to a standard which is quite simply impossible when you have a dream and a desire that you want to fulfil. So, to go back to my point about intuition again, I’d say it’s also very important to develop your intuition. I believe that women and men have an inner voice that will help them to discern between what it is right and wrong and what is best for them in their lives, but particularly for women, I think it’s really important to pay attention to developing an intuition that will lead you to a dream or a goal or an aspiration which you have started to imagine for yourself and one of my favourite authors is the American author and poet, Audre Lorde and there’s a phrase which she used in a recent, well not in a recent biography, but in her biography, called ‘Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’, where she said “if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies of me and eaten alive”. So I really think it’s so important for women to develop their own voice and not to think that they don’t have a dream, but really to develop that dream and to pursue education in any way which is possible for them.DR. MALKAWhat a wonderful expression, people embracing their uniqueness and that they listen to their own true voice and become their true selves. It’s been a pleasure having you on our show today, thanks for sharing the developments that you have underway within the school as well as the work that you’re doing for women in broader society.DR. LAKEThank you very much it’s been such a pleasure to be part of this programme on ‘Womanity’ as well.PROGRAMME END ................
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