Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37996

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Subject: search.filters.subject.SDG-5: Gender equality

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    Masjid Al-Nasaa: Women Call for an Islamic Elsewhere
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Hoosen, Leyya
    My research explores what it means to be a “Muslim woman” in South Africa in the digital age. More broadly, what does Muslimness and Religiosity mean? How do we enact these concepts and practices, and how do they inform our processes of identification? How does access to digital platforms allow a new way of engaging these forces? This research took place over the course of three years, starting in 2020, and was impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. With the increased digitalisation that came with the pandemic, many activities had to shift to online platforms to survive. This also created a space where Muslim women were able to create virtual masjids and hold online prayers. I followed one such online Jumu’ah (Friday prayer) group and interviewed the women who attended. I also interviewed women from a women-led South African Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) on their experiences and relationships with Islam(s). While their relationships with Islam(s) and Muslimness were complex and nuanced, what echoed through all their narratives was that they felt called to Islam(s) in some way and their Islamic practice was a response to that call. In my thesis, I unpack this call and use it as a guiding conceptual and theoretical framework. Through the multifaceted nature of the call, and the different ways that the women are called to Islam(s), I explore what it means to respond to a call that is not bounded or territorial in its address. The thesis takes the form of a masjid (mosque) in its architecture: beginning with a preface that is named ‘Niyyah’ (intention); moving into the ‘Wudhu’ introductory chapter that provides the contextual and historical orientations for the research; and then proceeding to go through seven chapters, named after the minarets (spires) in a masjid complex. These seven core theoretical and narrative chapters unpack the call to Islam(s) that the women experience. The call ranges from a call to the Digital Islamic Elsewhere as an alternate semi-public, to a call beyond essentialised identifications (such as ‘Muslim’), a call that re-orients and queers notions of the ‘Muslim woman’, to a call that challenges a hegemonic ummah (transnational Islamic community) in favour of a multiplicity of ummah(s), a call that is hidden and opaque, and a call that is ensouled in its manifestation. These different frequencies of the call to Islam(s) echo and reverberate through the thesis as I unpack what it means to be a woman in Islam(s) in the digital age.
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    Rethinking the Logics of the Sex/Gender Anatomical Schema
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) Nqambaza, Palesa Rose; Dube, Siphiwe
    This dissertation is an appraisal of the dominant gender discourse(s) in selected South African anthropological, gender and feminist texts. It challenges the uncritical adoption of colonial sex/gender frameworks when making sense of indigenous ways and modes of being and proposes an Afrocentric alternative that goes beyond bio-logical frameworks. This study is two pronged. Firstly, it problematises the uncritical application of Western feminist theories that have tended to impose European realities on the African context. Secondly, it mines the indigenous archive for Afrocentric ideas that contribute to creating a uniquely African theory of subject formation that considers aspects important to the African world-sense such as seniority, kinship status and ancestral links. I make use of critical discourse analysis to analyse the dominant discourse(s) and knowledge on sex and gender within the context of what is today known as South Africa. I do this employing the Azanian philosophical tradition as the theoretical framework that informs the perspective from which I read and make sense of these discourses, using a mixture of textual analysis, linguistics, archival work, and historical method. Based on my reading of dominant gender discourses against textual, linguistic and historical evidence, I make the following arguments. Firstly, I problematise the blanket usage of the conceptual category of ‘woman’ to refer to colonised subjectivities. I demonstrate that Black womxn have been discursively constructed as existing outside the bounds of the conceptual category ‘woman’ who is the key subject of feminist theorising. Secondly, I demonstrate that the logics of the sex/gender anatomical schema, that organises men and women in a hierarchy, cannot account for indigenous modes of social organising. I maintain that African subjectivities are fluid, complex and contingent, depending on aspects such as one’s seniority, kinship status and ancestral links. Likewise, I invoke the institution of ubungoma as an additional site to demonstrate the inadequacy of the sex/gender anatomical framework in making sense of sangoma subjectivities. I also problematise the tendency to use LGBTQ languaging as an alternative in making sense of the institution of ubungoma. I maintain that while noble, this alternative framing is also implicated in underscoring the existence of a coherent sex/gender regime within which the institution of ubungoma is then assumed to be ‘queer’. I maintain that there is a pressing need to mine indigenous linguistic archives for alternative ways of wording indigenous subjectivities in ways that are not distortive, nor mimic Eurocentric versions.
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    Wartime Rape, Gender, and Militarism: The Bukavu People’s Conceptualisation of the Emergence of Wartime Rape in the 2004 Kivu Conflict in Contrast to the 1996 First Congo War
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03-15) Mushagalusa, Alice Karhikalembu; Stevens, Garth; Von Holdt, Karl
    For more than a decade, armed conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been characterised by widespread wartime rape against civilians. The purposeful utilisation of wartime rape as a weapon of war has owed to the country unflattering labels, such as the “rape capital of the world, the worst place to be a woman, or again the dark hole”. The armed unrest in the DRC is rooted in the Belgian colonisation’s land administration policies that shaped some groups as native (autochthones) while constructing others as foreigners. Following an anti-war feminist perspective, this PhD explores the Bukavu people’s conceptualisation of the emergence of wartime rape in the 2004 Kivu Conflict in contrast to the 1996 First Congo War. I used participatory research methods, as dictated by the Covid-19 pandemic, to collect the data through focus groups and in-depth individual interviews with ordinary community members, former military officers, members of the civil society and community leaders in Bukavu (South Kivu Province, eastern DRC). The collected data made it possible to firstly recognise the absence of wartime rape as a weapon of war in the 1996 First Congo War; and to show that wartime rape has not always been ubiquitous in the DRC but became a lexicon that the perpetrators utilised to place divergent claims related to their customary land, military, political power ambitions, gendered ethnic identity, and citizenship aspirations. Secondly, the data allowed for disaggregating wartime rape into three categories based on the perpetrators’ motivations and claims. The thesis maintains that the Hutu-dominated Interahamwe militia, also recognised as the main authors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, resorted to rape in the eastern DRC for revenge and to (re)masculinise their troops while feminising the Congolese state. Next, this study demonstrates that the Rally for Congolese Democracy rebels, which claimed the Tutsi Congolese ethnicity, strategically resorted to wartime rape to claim customary land rights and citizenship recognition. Following, this thesis puts forward that the Mai-Mai militia, seen as native, erpetrated wartime rape to claim military respect and recognition while furthering the political agendas of their patrons. I maintain that patriarchy – as the shared norm between the perpetrators, the state and the victims (women, girls, men and boys) – makes it possible for wartime rape to be utilised as a lexicon and a destructive weapon against the victims’ sexual subjectivities and the whole community’s symbolic order. Hence, this study articulates a three-fold argument. This thesis firstly argues that the 2004 wartime rape is rooted in the Belgian colonisation and its lingering effects on forms of ethnicity, gender, land distribution and recognition of political rights in the present. Next, this thesis argues that wartime rape is a strategic weapon perpetrators utilise for revenge and to claim military recognition. Lastly, this study argues that the extreme violence of rape as an act of war aims to destroy the victims’ subjectivities and their community’s symbolic order. As such, this thesis weaves together three levels of analysis and examines wartime rape as multi-dimensional violence that interlaces into one act of wartime rape: the historical dimension (centring on land), the broader strategic considerations, and the destruction of victims’ subjectivities and the community’s symbolic order. At the same time, the combination of these dimensions varies considerably between the Hutu-dominated Interahamwe militia, the Rally for Congolese Democracy rebels, and the Mai-Mai militias – that is, the context even in one province within DRC produces variations in motive and form.