Chapter Three
3.3 Centres of Meaning-making
3.4.3. The Race Question in Gender
One of the biggest problems I had to face during my years in academia, and one which played itself out, to an extent in the WIR Project, was whatI refer to as the race question in gender equity initiatives. For many years I did not have the confidence to raise this for fear of being stereotyped (see Chapter Seven for details). I was constantly aware of the attempts by many to sweep these concerns under the carpet, the greatest fear for many being the so-called fracturing of the 'women' project. In this study I address this concern about the lack of information on women of colour, by examining the statistical data within the context of the demographic profiles, both nationally and provincially. The statistical data is further enriched by the qualitative explorations of the problems of women in academia, through the eyes of black women academics in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
The statistical data, together with the women's narratives, and my own testimonies,
provides a uniquely different 'take' on investigating the problems women face as knowledge producers. Whilst it is not the intention of this study to delve deeply into an analysis based on race, it uses the apartheid-designated categories of race to create a 'coloured' portraiture of women in research and offer a different perspective.
My reading in the area has shown that leading black feminists such as Coil ins (1990), hooks (1984), Amos & Palmer (1984) and Anthias &Yuval-Davis (1983) have shared this concern over the years, expressing grave difficulty to simply allow white, middle-class feminists to set the agendas that invariably foreground issues of gender over race. Whilst women of colour have argued that feminist analysis and theory have represented the experience of white women as the norm, the issues of racism constitutes a primary site of our oppression (hooks, 1984).
The infusion of the race question into matters of gender is linked to its legacy of colonisation and imperialism. White women academics and researchers need to understand that they have been implicated in this colonisation and imperialism and that it was not the sole agenda of white men. South Africa was colonised on a racially imperialistic base and not a sexually imperialistic base. Like men in the comfort of their dominant gender position, white women can afford to take their race and ethnicity for granted; it can be silent because it is a given and generic in its racial and cultural hegemony. Women of colour, on the other hand, have to foreground their race and ethnicity; in its 'otherness' it defines them, it self-defines and it is invoked to specify what 'white' is not in racialised terms. That 'white' is a racial category is now acknowledged as is the fact that it is "privileged, unanalysed, taken for granted and itself a 'minority' status"
(Afshar & Maynard, 1994). Spelman (1988) also analyses 'white' as the norm so that 'difference' attaches to others, that is, non-whites, thereby 'othering' them all the more. In addition to a focus on difference, I again emphasise the need to look into power relations.
We need to interrogate hierarchical relations that differentiate categories of women, race and other attributes such as class, sexual orientation and disability, within the broad analytical category of women. There is a materiality about the convergence of race and gender discrimination, a double mutually reinforcing jeopardy that qualitatively changes the nature of the subordination (Maynard, 1994; see also Brah, 1991). It colludes with other historical, economic and socio-cultural constraints and exerts pressure to form the
complex dynamics of the multiple jeopardy suffered by classes of non-white women across the world.
In my broadly feminist perspective, I desist from suggesting that women's experience, in South Africa or elsewhere, is a unitary whole. Failure to recognise the way in which factors such as race, ethnicity, class, age, nationality or disability intersect women's experience of the academy does tend to present a sorely distorted picture. However, failure to recognise and emphasise the common threads would preclude the possibility of political action.
Many years ago, Lorde (1977) argued that within the (American) women's movement,
White women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class and age. There is a pretence to homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhoodthat does not in fact exist.
Contemporary feminism has moved towards a greater recognition of diversity, but the challenge remains of "how differences among women can be accorded the respect and analytical importance they deserve without destroying the integrity of the concept 'women' upon which much of feminism as a political practice rests" (Acker, 1994). While the experience of South African women academics is diverse, there are areas of commonality and that need not negate substantial diversity within that group. As Oakley (1997) suggests,
What women academics are able to do is important to them as individuals, but also to female students in the academy, whose own notions of identity and autonomy are partly framed in response to this.
Access and development of women academics and postgraduate students at South African universities will depend in large measure on the conditions facing women in the academy at all levels.
The salience of race for women in South Africa has been debated among feminists. This debate is typically referred to as the 'difference' debate (see, for instance, Agenda, 1993;
1997) and it centres both on the relations between black and white women as feminists as,
researchers and as activists as well as on the contribution of race to gendered subjectivity.
With regard to the latter, there are two dominant models: a model of triple oppression which includes gender, race and class, and a poststructuralist model which rejects the additive connotations of a triple oppression in favour of a view of subjectivity as simultaneously having race and gender which cannot be viewed distinctly and separately (de la Rey, 1998).
The relevance of acknowledging the effect and significance of 'difference' along race and gender lines goes beyond discourse theory, deconstruction and post-modernism. It has to be political and therein lies the recognition of the purpose of their dismantling. Power, hierarchy and inequality are the consequences of that interaction which in turn explains differentiation between categories of 'white women' and categories of 'black'. Power relations still coincide with lines of racial and gender difference. It is therefore, not possible to separate the two sites of oppression off from each other since they act with and through each other to produce acute occupational segregation along race/gender lines. It would be fruitless, therefore, for any equity and transformation to privilege one form of oppression over the other. This contradictory location that we occupy in academia often makes it difficult to see where and how our politics are co-opted by our institutions, where and how our power and privilege become transformed within the bureaucratic web into potentially disabling political effects on others and ourselves.
The issues that we contest, the vanous fronts on which we struggle and the political strategies we use are often loaded with contradictory meaning and effects. If we act in one way, it may have repercussions on another level; if we get outraged over one issue, we stand to make enemies in one camp but form alliances in another; if we speak and behave unbefitting the feminine academic image, we may lose the attention of those men whose attention we need in order to get our issues on the agenda. What this all means is that as women academics and researchers, we are already packaged as 'other'.
3.5. Male-stream Culture Unpacked
Clearly there is a relationship between the normalisation of men's advantaged position and the unremarkability and hence invisibility of their collective behaviour which resists our
attempts to join them. I have already noted the consistent and remarkable absence of men in the literature, as the human agents of the behaviour, activities, habits and traditions which collectively has such a negative impact on women in each of the key areas of research, senior management, skilled technical work and higher education. This absence of men in the very literature which problematises the impact of their 'culture' on women, is a clear reflection of the relationship between the normalisation of male advantage and the invisibility of male resistance to its reduction or removal. So long as the behaviour the men collectively engage in, to exclude and marginalise our contribution to such key sites of power and influence in our society, remains unnamed, masked and congealed in abstract and metaphorical terms and conceptualisations, both that behaviour and the advantaged status which it defends and perpetuates for men, remain normalised, unremarkable, unproblematical and therefore invisible and unchallengeable. As Eduards (1992) points out, the most effective opposition to change is one that is kept intangible. What this study does is try to make the intangible, tangible through its deliberate focus on this male- streaming.
While recogniSIng the historical necessity to explain and document our disadvantaged position in employment, education and indeed in research, Eveline (1994) argues that the almost exclusive attention which has been given to women's problematical disadvantaged status, in policy analysis and practitioners' discourse in this country, has perpetuated and reinforced an assumption that processes advantaging men are immutable, indeed normative. In a recent article entitled 'The Politics of Advantage', Eveline refers to this as the foregrounding of disadvantage (for women), which achieves the corresponding backgrounding of advantage (for men). Thus, she writes, 'the everyday spectrum of privileges that accrue to men are taken as unremarkable...and the dynamics by which they are accorded, also remains unspoken' (p. 130). Cockburn's work (1990) is an exception in this regard, drawing attention to and problematising men's resistance to equal opportunity policy processes in a range of contemporary organisations. Her work builds on earlier analyses, including Woolf's (1933) references to the history of men's resistance to women's emancipation, and more contemporary analyses such as those by Burton (1991) and Connell (1987). However, this emphasis on resistance as a central problematic is not common in either the wider literature, or the strategic and policy discourse of equal opportunity practitioners.
Breaking with the tradition of foregrounding women's disadvantage as the malO problematic by confronting the pervasiveness of men's advantages, Cockburn itemises the way men organise against women to retain these advantages, which at the behavioural level involves the fostering of solidarity between men, sexualising, threatening, marginalizing, controlling and dividing women.
Women's choices then in these circumstances would appear to be limited to the following two: to leave, which many do, whether prematurely or simply by not progressing as expected to higher levels of study or work, or to try to cope with, adjust and accommodate and hence to accept as unproblematic this climate and culture which excludes, marginalizes and at times demeans us. Understanding the problem from the perspective of phallocentric, patriarchal, sexist discourse offers a possibility for change or progress, either for the individual women facing these choices, or for the institutions themselves, or indeed for the nature and directions of higher education as a whole.