Nyamah, Kholofelo2023-01-232023-01-232022https://hdl.handle.net/10539/34185This report is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Social and Psychological Research in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2020The aim of this study was to explore the discourses embedded in the talk of Black women about their representation in popular magazines. Representations of women have been disproportionately adverse in their accounts of Black women throughout history. However, alongside these representations, pockets of counter-normative representations also always existed. Post-apartheid South Africa has seen a rapid development and advancement of Black women. This advancement has contributed to greater counter-normative representations that contest the aforementioned ones. The duality of representations that demonstrate both positive and negative constructions of Blackness and women, demonstrate the fluidity of Black gendered subjectivities. Though Black women’s representations have shifted significantly, the underlying pervasiveness of their adverse representations remain. So far, however, there has been minimal discussion or account of how Black South African women receive these images. The participants comprised of 17 Black women who were either in second, third or Honours year between the ages of 18-26 studying towards a degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. Four focus groups were conducted to capture their accounts and the embedded discourses. Parker’s Discourse analysis was used to extrapolate the meanings that arose from the discourses present in talk. The findings demonstrate that the participants both reproduced normative constructions of Black women that essentialised Black femininity in addition to producing counter-normative constructions that offered a number of alternate subjectivities available to Black women. The findings of this study have implications for uncovering how Black women contest and reproduce these representations, revealing different ways in which Black women experience themselves as being both raced and gendered in contemporary South Africa.enDissertation