The Teaching of Sexual and Gender Diversity Issues to Pre-service Teachers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: Lessons from Student Exam Responses

Abstract This paper use

Education for the "African child": Distant illusion?

One of the key features of post-apartheid South Africa has been an ongoing debate around access to quality education. Educational policy experts have decried what they have often termed a “dysfunctional” schooling system that fails to prepare students adequately for independent thinking and future life prospects. Prominent amongst the circulating debates have been important, yet peripheral issues such as resources, curriculum change and general inequality, forgetting the very real and systematic ways in which racial ideological thinking came to drive education in South Africa during apartheid

Editorial: Can Policy Learn from Practice?

At the best of times, higher education is known to be in a state of unbridled turbulence. That it should be any less so, remains (thankfully) a point of unresolved contention. What we do know from the South African experience, is that during times of discomfort, institutions take refuge in policy formulation, policy reform, and less frequently, policy dialogue. This was evident in the decades preceding what has been typecast as the ‘pre-democratic era’, when education policy units were the heartbeats of universities, some boldly located in the portals of campuses – supported by their university communities, others hovelled in more perilous enclaves, often at the mercy of the state security apparatus. Singularly and collectively, these units exposed the brutality of a divided and divisive education system, characterized by governmentality, geared for social engineering. Policy units envisioned a new future of possibility in which universities nurtured human talent for the greater good.In the years following ‘liberation’, policy units redirected their energies from activism and advocacy to an evidence-based approach to systemic reform, providing the signposts for reform and identifying benchmarks to measure the success of transformation agendas. During this period, many of the policy units quietly faded into the landscape, being either absorbed into mainstream academia or into government departments. The ensuing period was one of vigorous policy development by government, accompanied by an emerging evaluation culture, often associated with performativity

Gender regimes and gender relations in higher education: The case of a civil engineering course

This study documents how hegemonic masculinity is experienced through the lens of five female students registered in an engineering course using a single instrumental case study research contextualised in a national university in Mauritius. It analyses how these relations and interactions are interpreted and integrated in the ways the participants are choosing to ‘do gender’ reflecting critically on what this reveals about acceptance of and resistance to these gendered cultural norms by aspiring women engineers. Interpreted from the lens of gender regimes (Connell 2002), the findings indicate how male students legitimised their power by foregrounding the physical inadequacy of their female classmates, the cultural barriers associated with the rough vocabulary of builders which are certain to cause discomfort to female engineers, and the physically strenuous working environments, all of which are designed to assert a male reading of what engineering work is about. What is, however, also evident is the acceptance of these views by some female participants who feel compelled, to accept ‘male help’ designed to enforce some form of control and superiority. ‘Beating the boys’ on their own preferred terrain of abstract thinking appears to be a way for some participants to level the field despite against attempts to represent engineering knowledge as ‘male’, and only allowing privileged female students to access such understandings is a common gatekeeping exercise endorsed by male classmates. Contribution: This study shows the deep transformations that need to be brought about in higher education settings, particularly in small island contexts where the dominant culture is often silently resistant to progressive equality agenda

Gay Rights, the Devil and the End Times: Public Religion and the Enchantment of the Homosexuality Debate in Zambia

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context

Queering transformation in higher education

Transformation in higher education has tended to focus on race and sex, at the expense of other forms of discrimination. This article addresses the silencing of ‘queer’ issues in higher education. Using queer theory as a framework, and drawing on current literature, popular media reports, two personal critical incidents and a project addressing homophobia in educational institutions, I explore the concerning nature and pervasiveness of homophobia in South African higher education institutions and argue for the adoption of a queer approach towards transformation. Such an approach prioritises the intersectionality and multiplicity of social identities and foregrounds queer issues in South African higher education institutions, including the challenging of homophobia and its manifestations

Intersections of two isiZulu genderlects and the construction of 'skesana' identities

Drawing on Youdell’s (2000, 2005, 2006) work on identity formation, we examine in this article multiple performances of gender identities in relation to a particular language use among African men who engage in same-sex relations. Based on semi-ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with African men who are isiNgqumo speakers in the Durban metropolitan area in KwaZulu-Natal, this article portrays the intersectional nature of two genderlects. The isiNgqumo lexicon is characterised largely by what Zulu speakers refer to as “deep” lexicon, and a closer examination reveals that a substantial number of lexical items are drawn from the isiHlonipho variety of Zulu, also termed “isiHlonipho Sabafazi” (‘women’s language of respect’). Hlonipha (lit. ‘respect’) social actions and language use are representative of showing submissiveness towards males and other people who are considered superiors. On the basis of the experiences of men who engage in same-sex relations and who self-identify as skesana, we argue that an isiNgqumo variety that draws from the isiHlonipho lexicon represents a linguistic variety that is linked to a heteronormative and patriarchal cultural system which renders femininity an inferior subject position. Within this gendered order, certain linguistic expressions of isiNgqumo can create tension-riddled identity categories and allow for complex positioning for skesanas, many of whom draw on heteronormative and heteropoleric categories in the construction of their sexual and gender identities.</p

Teaching about heterosexism: challenging homophobia in South Africa

This article, a critical review of a module on heterosexism and homophobia, sets out the challenges to be overcome if the oppressive conditions for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students and teachers in South Africa are to be changed. It draws on evidence from student assignments, records of participatory discussions and the notes of the authors, who taught the module. The authors argue that the participatory methods used in this course are essential if teachers are to become agents of change. However, these methods need to be linked to a clear and coherent theoretical foundation that enables students to draw links between different forms of oppression