3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Of patriarchy, madness, mythology, and the queer in nation making: a critique on tropes of sexualities in post-colonial African literatures(2018) Magano, ThatoThis research report interrogates how queer sexualities are represented in postcolonial African literatures. It queries representations of queer sexualities and their place in the fiction of the nation. It deploys queer as the coopted marker of pride and liberation that was deployed by gender and sexuality activists in the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequently, gender and sexuality scholars in contemporary times. It relies on this articulation of queer to locate homosexuality and same-sex desire at the centre of an argument about the development of the idea of the African nation, and how this idea continues to locate same-sex desire and sexuality outside of or hidden in discussions about dominant modes of sexuality expressions. It reads Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958/1962) in conversation with Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) to explore the discursive modalities through which queer sexualities circulate in these seminal works, and to interrogate the extent to which they employ Achebe’s fictional world as integral to what it means to be African. This exploration is located within a set of assumptions about how the African nation is reproduced, and how modes of living and existing, are determined in African literature. Central to its argument, it meditates on the narrative closures employed by Achebe, Dangarembga and Duiker to determine how they facilitate, challenge, affirm or disrupt the sanctity of the heterosexual African nation through the circulation of patriarchal constructions of masculinity and same-sex desires and sexuality. The report explores the extent to which the texts deploy mythology and madness as points of entry into transgressive modes of existence within the nation. It further considers the role of the archive in imagining the queer body in the nation and the power dynamics that instruct the reading of same-sex desiring and homosexual bodies as non-normative. It argues that due to the exclusion of same-sex desiring and homosexual bodies in what constitutes the imaginary of the African nation in negotiating the nation’s anxiety about benefiting from the nations affect schema, the excluded bodies are burdened with the work of excavating from historical archives to legitimate their existence. In using the archive, the report argues that queer bodies enact resistance by un-silencing the archive and excavating the costs of a collective forgetting process that facilitates the postcolonial project of civilized sensibilities. This work is undertaken to perform historical commentary that trespasses the dominant modes of erasure that continue to locate the queer body as outside the experience of Blackness. The report ultimately makes a case for the productive capacity of interrogating and reporting Black abjection in order to construct epistemological frameworks that enable a pedagogy that re-memories and re-members those that the nation opts to erase. It argues for a disavowal of fictions about progress that are predicated on a desire that fits within the scope of liberal conceptions of progress and civility. As a mode of re-memory-ing and re-member-ing, this report proposes an affinity for irresolvability with regards to conceptions of subjecthood in order to negotiate nationmaking projects that are liberatory for those who have been historically placed outside of the complicated and irresolvable matrix of national sentiment that privileges heterosexual sexuality expressions.Item Challenging performances of hegemony in Tango: liberation through pedagogy(2015) Da Cunha, Adriana MirandaThis study aims to explore ideas of liberation in relation to the present tendencies of gender representation in Tango. I argue that the traditional pedagogic model, observed in Johannesburg, tends to perpetuate hegemonic discourses mainly through terminology in which gender binaries, codes and subjectivities are normalized. Such representations reduce, or even reject, plurality and diversity by sustaining specific power dynamics, necessarily related to the role of men and women. Tango is characterized by certain aesthetic elements described in this thesis, and here I prioritize the analysis of its role as a social dance, in the category of couples’ dances. I argue that couples’ dances are embedded in historically and socially constructed stereotypes; thus, the dynamics observed in balls are not capable of reflecting present gender complexities and identities. To do so, I first present a critical reflection of the history of couples’ dances and Tango, along with my own lived experience as a movement facilitator. Then, I present descriptions of the first phase of the research, the Performance as Research (PAR) project in which I aimed to deconstruct hegemony by challenging gender fixities. The PAR included creative processes, interviews, performance, media and textual production, and the main outcome was related to the pedagogy of dance, presenting the DE-GENDERED MODEL of teaching-learning. In the second phase of research, or what I call the fieldwork, I engaged with different methods, such as dance meetings based on investigative approaches, body mapping, micro-performance, group discussions and questionnaires to collect data together with a group of 9 participants. I made sense of all the information collected during PAR, and, given by participants during fieldwork, by correlating theories of performance, critical pedagogy, gender and queer studies, with the purpose of including collaborative pathways of embodiment.Item The development of psychological androgyny and its relationship with self-esteem in adolescence(2015-02-05) Hornibrook, RobinThe present study aimed to investigate the effect of sex-role identity on self-esteem in samples of adolescents. The subject population consisted of 208 white, English-speaking, middle-class adolescents. Subjects were divided into three age groups of 13 year olds, 15 year olds, and first year undergraduates. Within these three groups, four variables were investigated, namely, age, sex, sex-role identity, and self-esteem. Self-esteem was measured by means of the Tennessee Self Concept Scale, and sex-role identity by means of the Bern Sex-Role Inventory. Two-way analyses of variance were utilized to compare the mean scores obtained by each of the four sex-role categories on self-esteem. Results were then compared by sex. In addition, chi-square contingency tests were utilized to test for the incidence of androgyny in the three age groups and to compare the incidence of androgyny in a South African sample with the incidence reported in an American sample. Using a significance level of .05 as the criterion for significance, significant results were produced for most of the hypotheses. Psychological androgyny was found to be positively associated with higher levels of self-esteem at all three ages. The results -re discussed in terms of gender schema theory and psychoanalytic theory and suggestions made for clinical application. Limitations of the present research are discussed and suggestions made for further research.