Showing items 1 - 7 of 7

Interrogating questions of national belonging, difference and xenophobia in South Africa

- Batisai, Kezia

  • Authors: Batisai, Kezia
  • Date: 2016
  • Subjects: Gender, sexual, racial and national identities , Technologies of difference , Xenophobia
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/212769 , uj:21025 , Citation: Batisai, K. 2016. Interrogating questions of national belonging, difference and xenophobia in South Africa.
  • Description: Abstract: Questions about gender and sexuality that were central to the colonial project where women negotiated their connection to the nation through liaisons with men continue to be central to the process of building postcolonial African states. The establishment of many African flag-democracies for instance has been embedded in dense body politics that often exclude genders and sexualities categorised as counter to citizenship. Exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa is evident in how black lesbians and queers are ‘othered’ for being sexually different. Consequently, one’s gender, sexual and racial identities serve as a source of violence and constant negotiation for belonging to this flagdemocracy irrespective of the progressive constitution. The feeling of not being a ‘proper’ citizen is equally evident in how nationals from the northern part of South Africa are in some spaces constructed by fellow citizens as bodies that do not belong. These polarised constructions generate outsider identities that are informed by notions of ‘inferior pigmentation and language’ vis-à-vis ‘dominant ones’. Such dichotomised images of citizenship are reinforced by ever-evolving grammas and vocabularies about people foreign to South Africa, whose bodies and privacy warrant intrusion in very violent nationalised, racialised, gendered and sexualised ways as evidenced by the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic attacks. Informed by my intersecting positionalities as a black foreign national who has lived in South Africa since 2008, the paper analyses Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of constantly negotiating the politics of national belonging and difference in South Africa that emerged during fieldwork engagements in Johannesburg between 2008 and 2015. The paper interrogates subtle and overt institutionalised and everyday technologies of difference that not only force foreign nationals to live through heavily patrolled black bodies marked as different within specific temporal landscapes, places and spaces but are also core to the xenophobic grammar that frames Zimbabweans as bodies that destabilise the very foundation and survival of the nation.
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Pushing the limits of motherhood : narratives of older women in rural Zimbabwe

- Batisai, Kezia

  • Authors: Batisai, Kezia
  • Date: 2017
  • Subjects: Motherhood , Ageing , Older women
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/242083 , uj:24964 , Citation: Batisai, K. 2017. Pushing the limits of motherhood : narratives of older women in rural Zimbabwe.
  • Description: Abstract: Drawing on narratives of rurally based Zimbabwean older women, this article analyses experiences of motherhood in relation to the country’s shifting economic and socio-political landscapes. The narratives of these older women, who have nurtured their children and continue to do so way into (their children’s) adulthood, push scholars to grapple with questions of motherhood in respect of “intensive mothering” (Bell 2006: 232; Hays 1996). Intensive mothering points at the exclusivity of motherhood which frames the responsibility to provide and care for the children during their formative years as virtually the mother’s (Bell 2006: 232; Glenn 1994: 3). Older women in this article are second and third generation mothers whose narratives challenge constructions of motherhood which limit intensive mothering to the formative stages of children’s lifecycle.
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Revisiting the politics of land recovery among white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe: Implications for transitional justice

- Batisai, Kezia, Mudimu, George T.

The intersections of identity, belonging and drug use disorder : struggles of male youth in post-apartheid South Africa

- Sibanda, Arina, Batisai, Kezia

Towards an integrated approach to health and medicine in Africa

- Batisai, Kezia

  • Authors: Batisai, Kezia
  • Date: 2016
  • Subjects: HIV/AIDS , Health-seeking behaviour , Medical humanities
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/122834 , uj:20711 , Citation: Batisai, K. 2016. Towards an integrated approach to health and medicine in Africa.
  • Description: Abstract: This article frames the intersections of medicine and humanities as intrinsic to understanding the practice of health care in Africa. Central to this manuscript, which draws on empirical findings on the interplay between HIV/AIDS and alternative medicine in Zimbabwe; is the realisation that very limited research has been undertaken to examine ‘HIV/AIDS patient behaviour’ with respect to choice of therapy on the continent (Chavunduka 1998; Bene & Darkoh 2014; O’Brien & Broom 2014). As such, a social approach to health-seeking behaviour questions how decisions about alternative therapies including herbal remedies, traditional healing and faith healing are made. The paper unpacks the realities around how people living with HIV/AIDS – who span different age groups and profess various religious backgrounds, faced with an insurmountable health challenge against a background of limited resources and no cure for the virus – often experience shifts in health-seeking behaviour. Grappling with seemingly simple questions about ‘when, where and how to seek medical attention’, the paper provides pointers to therapy choices and health-seeking behaviour; and it serves as a route into deeper and intense health care practice explorations. In conclusion, the paper proposes that medicine and the humanities should engage seriously with those social aspects of HIV/AIDS which call for an integrated approach to health care practice in Africa. If combined, medicine and the humanities might achieve what neither would alone.
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Transnational labour migration, intimacy and relationships: how Zimbabwean women navigate the diaspora

- Batisai, Kezia

Unsung heroines and violence for the land : narratives of elderly women farmers’ experiences in South Africa and Zimbabwe

- Chipuriro, Rejoice, Batisai, Kezia

  • Authors: Chipuriro, Rejoice , Batisai, Kezia
  • Date: 2018
  • Subjects: Bodies , Gendered violence , Women land rights
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://ujcontent.uj.ac.za8080/10210/391235 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/290151 , uj:31494 , Citation: Chipuriro, R. & Batisai, K. 2018. Unsung heroines and violence for the land : narratives of elderly women farmers’ experiences in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
  • Description: Abstract: Scholarly evidence from African flag-democracies reveals that although women were central to the liberation struggle, narratives of their participation and contribution let alone the violence they suffered on their bodies during the fight for land were invisible from post-independence discourses. In Zimbabwe, female freedom fighters were reduced to sexual objects who merely went to war to perform ‘reed dance’ for the male freedom fighters. Subsequently, the negative labelling limited women’s chances postindependence and even deterred them from enjoying the fruits of the land they fought hard for. Scholarship equally reveals that society to this day believes that women who actively pursue politics in Botswana transgress culture and socially acceptable behaviour. This negativity, in many African contexts where women struggled for democracy, not only trivialises their contribution but invisibilizes their bodies from the land they fought for. Although women’s contribution to democracy in South Africa is acknowledged through the annual celebration of the August 9 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings, the commemoration does not do justice to individual women’s contribution to the land as well as their struggles on and for the land. Their contribution to the land is often ‘celebrated’ and negotiated through men and as a result, women suffer the effects of a gendered and hierarchized patriarchal structure which reads their relationship to and struggle for the land through their sexual and reproductive bodies. Building on the gendered realities of unsung heroines who fought for land, this article pursues the theme ‘women for land’ through elderly women farmers’ narratives of violence on the land in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The article theorises that as the elderly women’s violent experiences on the land are heard, they not only cease to be mere (sexual and reproductive) bodies that deserve to be violated but they emerge as voices that re-value previously uncelebrated women who fought for the land. These empirical voices simultaneously insert the unsung heroines’ long forgotten experiences into the historical land struggle narrative and contemporary land rights framework that seeks to redress the violent gendered patriarchal effects that women suffer on, for and through the land in South Africa, Zimbabwe and beyond.
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