Abstract
M.Tech. (Fine Art)
This research examines how Afrikaner women’s identities have been compromised by means of gendered
othering, resulting in their apparent silence and lack of agency in recorded Afrikaner histories. My study is
framed by a consideration of the Calvinist bias within Afrikaner nationalism during the apartheid era, and
the resulting patriarchy prevalent at that time. This legacy affected the role of gender, religion, and social
disparities in Afrikaner society up to and including the era of my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s.
Conflicts resulting from the role and treatment of women under Afrikaner ideology are a particular concern
in this study and inform my art practice.
I suggest an ‘alternative archive’ as a framework to capture subconscious, previously unrecorded aspects of
Afrikaner female identities through art. I demonstrate how memory and engagement with family
photographs could be viable methods of enquiry into the reconstruction of personal identity, with particular
reference to the work of artists Karin Preller and Antoinette Murdoch.
My practical work engages with memory by sewing or suturing photographic and recollected traces of my
childhood together. In this way I create metaphorical constructions of identities that shift between past and
present as I try to come to terms with my ambivalence, a condition in which I am proud of my heritage yet
reject its Calvinist, patriarchal influence on my life. I refer to multiple subjectivities as well as
transformative notions of identity within a new conception of democracy and, in so doing, contend that an
identity of ‘becoming’ helps to redress the hegemony of Afrikaner patriarchy imposed on generations of
Afrikaner women.