THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:FEMINIST THEORIES
4.5. THEORY OF OPPRESSION (YOUNG, 1990)
132 reveals the body as an object of knowledge and as a target for the exercise of power.
The body is shown to be located in a political field, invested with power relations which render it ‘docile’ and ‘productive’, and thus politically and economically useful. Focault’s genealogical analyses begin with an examination of the character of modern power relations and questions how power is exercised and how it is alsoassociated with knowledge. Foucault is relevant for this study, which deals with women’s bodies that are literally carried away by men with the intention to marry.
133 that particularly the Marxist concept of class does not adequately encompass the explanation of important phenomena of sexual and racial oppression.
According to Young (1990), feminists have shown that women’s oppression partly consists of a systematic and unreciprocated transfer of powers from women to men that results in inequalities of power, status and wealth between women and men.However, men do not often rise in power, status and wealth independently, as in most cases they receive support from women. Some authors (for example, Ferguson, 1979; Delphy, 1984); Alexander, 1987) have argued that women’s domestic labour represents a form of capitalist class exploitation. In most situations, as women continue to be domestic ‘wage workers’ or to do work that supports the jobs that are done by men, women are making it possible for men to accumulate their wealth, power and status. According to Young (1990) this is “gender exploitation”, and she argues that it has two aspects, namely the transfer of the fruits of material labour to men, and the transfer of nurturing and sexual energies to men.
As a group, women experience specific forms of gender exploitation when their energies and power are expended in domestic labour, usually to benefit men who are released to do more important and creative work that enhances their status (Young, 1990, p.51). Men also benefit when they receive sexual or emotional ‘service’ from women in the domestic sphere. However, much work is needed to deal with the exploitation of women, as Young (1990, p.53) states:
Bringing about justice where there is exploitation requires reorganisation of institutions and practices of decision making, alteration of the division of labour, and similar measures of institutional, structural, and cultural change.
4.5.2. Marginalisation
According to Young (1990, p.53), ‘marginals’ are people which the system of labour cannot or will not use. She states that in most Western capitalist societies a growing
134 underclass of people permanently confined to lives of social marginality exists, and this class of people mostly comprises Blacks or Indians (in Latin America), and Blacks, East Indians, Eastern Europeans, or North Africans (in Europe). However, Young (1990, p.53) argues that marginalisation does not only apply to racially marked groups, because in the USA old people who are not old enough to retire become marginal when they get laid off from their jobs and cannot find new work. Similarly, young people, especially Black or Latino, who cannot find first or second jobs, many single mothers, other people who are involuntarily unemployed, and many mentally and physically disabled people also form part of the marginalised groups in society. In arguing against marginalisation, Young (1990, p.53) states:
Marginalisation is the most dangerous form of oppression, [because] a whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.
The material deprivation marginalisation often causes is certainly unjust, especially in a society where others have plenty.
Furthermore, Young (1990, p.55) maintains that marginalisation does not cease to be oppressive when one has shelter and food: “even if marginals were provided a comfortable material life within institutions that respected their freedom and dignity, injustices of marginality would remain in the form of uselessness, boredom, and lack of self-respect.”
4.5.3. Powerlessness
According to Young (1990) an adequate conception of oppression includes the experience of social division structured by a division of labour between professionals and non-professionals, and this is reflected in a distinction between the ‘middle class’
and the ‘working class’. Young (1990) further states that professionals are privileged in relation to non-professionals, because of their position in the division of labour and the status it carries. In addition to the exploitation they suffer, non-professionals suffer a form of oppression, which Young (1990, p.56) calls “powerlessness”. She further claims
135 that when in a state of powerlessness, people lack the authority, status, and sense of self that professionals commonly have (Young, 1990, p.56).
According to Young (1990), the status privilege of professionals has three aspects: (1) progress in acquiring expertise, and then in the course of professional advancement and rise in status, (2) authority over others, for example, consumers’ lives often stand under the authority of professionals, and lastly, (3) respectability, which relates to the privileges of the professional that extend beyond the workplace to a whole way of life.
This means professionals receive more respectful treatment than non-professionals
4.5.4. Cultural imperialism
According to Young (1990), cultural imperialism involves the universalisation of a dominant group's experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm. She states that “to experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (Young, 1990, p.59).
4.5.5. Violence
According to Young (1990), several groups of people suffer the oppression of systematic violence, where members of some groups live in fear of random unprovoked attacks on their persons or property. Often the motive for such attacks is to damage, humiliate or destroy the person (Young, 1990). Young (1990, p.61) gives examples of groups that lived under such threats of violence in the USA: women, Blacks, Asians, Arabs, gay men and lesbians. According to Young (1990, p.61), “what makes violence a face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable”. Furthermore, Young (1990) argues that what makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice and not merely an individual moral wrong is its systemic
136 character and existence as a social practice. She writes that “violence is systemic because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group” (Young, 1990, p.62).
Young asserts that any woman has a reason to fear rape, and that regardless of what he/she has done to escape the oppressions of powerlessness or marginality, lives knowing he is subject to attack or harassment. In addition to direct victimisation, the daily knowledge shared by all members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group identity also exists. Living under such a threat of attack on oneself, or family or friends deprives the oppressed of freedom and dignity, and needless to say expends their energy (Young, 1990).
Young (1990, pp.42-43) argues that our daily discourse differentiates people according to social groups such as women and men, age groups, racial and ethnic groups, religious groups and so on. However, Young (1990, p.45) contendsthat “social groups are not themselves homogeneous. Although social processes of affinity and differentiation produce groups, they do not give groups a substantive essence”.
According to her, groups exist only in relation to other groups; therefore, in this view, oppressionis something that happens to people when they are classified in groups.
Young (1990, p.47) claims that:
Because others identify them as a group, they are excluded and despised.
Eliminating oppression thus requires eliminating groups. People should be treated as individuals, not as members of groups, and allowed to form their lives freely without stereotypes or group norms.
Young (1990, p.42) asserts that whether a group isoppressed depends on whether it is subject to one or more of the five conditions or the five faces of oppression as mentioned earlier, and further argues that:
because different factors, or combinations of factors, constitute the oppression of different groups, making their oppression irreducible, she believes it is not
137 possible to give one definition of oppression. The five categories articulated in this chapter, however, are adequate to describe the oppression of any group, as well as its similarities with and differences from the oppression of other groups.
In different groups oppressions exhibit different combinations of these forms, and this applies to different individuals in the groups. The above theory was preferred for this study, as it is used in the analysis of data to determine the existence or non-existence, nature and extent of oppression in the practice of ukuthwala that still prevails in selected rural areas of KZN. However Young’s theory of oppression is used in conjunction with the intersectionality theory, which was discussed earlier, to understand how gender, culture and rights intersect and shape the experiences of Zulu women in selected rural areas of KZN.