An intersectional analysis of male caregiving in South African palliative care : identifying disruptive potential in reinventions of white, hegemonic masculinity
- Dworzanowski-Venter, Bronwyn
- Authors: Dworzanowski-Venter, Bronwyn
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Masculinity , Care , Emotional Labour
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/255631 , uj:26816 , Citation: Dworzanowski-Venter, B. 2017. An intersectional analysis of male caregiving in South African palliative care : identifying disruptive potential in reinventions of white, hegemonic masculinity.
- Description: Abstract: Care work is often feminised and invisible. Intangible components of care, such as emotional labour, are rarely recognised as economically valuable. Men engaging in care work can be stigmatised or simply made invisible for non-conformance to gender norms (Dworzanowski- Venter 2008). Mburu et.al. (2014) and Chikovore et.al. (2016) have studied masculinity from an intersectional perspective. Yet, male caregiving has not enjoyed sufficient intersectional focus. Intersectional analysis of male caregiving has twin benefits of making ‘women’s work’ visible and of finding ways to keep men involved in caring occupations. I foreground the class-gender intersection in this study of black, male, caregivers as emotional labourers involved in palliative care work in Gauteng (2005-2013). Informal AIDS care and specialist oncology nursing are contrasting case studies of male care work presented in this paper. Findings suggest that caregiving men interviewed for this study act in gender disruptive ways and face a stigmatising social backlash in post-colonial South Africa. Oncology nursing has a professional cachet denied to informal sector caregivers. This professional status acts as a class-based insulator against oppressive gender-based stigma, for oncology nursing more closely aligns to an idealised masculinity. The closer to a ‘respectable’ middle-class identity, or bourgeois civility, the better for these men who idealise traditionally white, male, formal sector occupations. However, this insulating effect relies on a denial of emotional aspects of care by male cancer nurses and a lack of activism around breaking down gendered notions of care work. Forming a guild of informal sector AIDs caregivers could add much-needed professional recognition and provide an organisational base for gender norm disruption through activism. This may help to retain more men in informal sector caregiving roles and challenge the norms that are used to stigmatise male caregiving work in general.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Dworzanowski-Venter, Bronwyn
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Masculinity , Care , Emotional Labour
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/255631 , uj:26816 , Citation: Dworzanowski-Venter, B. 2017. An intersectional analysis of male caregiving in South African palliative care : identifying disruptive potential in reinventions of white, hegemonic masculinity.
- Description: Abstract: Care work is often feminised and invisible. Intangible components of care, such as emotional labour, are rarely recognised as economically valuable. Men engaging in care work can be stigmatised or simply made invisible for non-conformance to gender norms (Dworzanowski- Venter 2008). Mburu et.al. (2014) and Chikovore et.al. (2016) have studied masculinity from an intersectional perspective. Yet, male caregiving has not enjoyed sufficient intersectional focus. Intersectional analysis of male caregiving has twin benefits of making ‘women’s work’ visible and of finding ways to keep men involved in caring occupations. I foreground the class-gender intersection in this study of black, male, caregivers as emotional labourers involved in palliative care work in Gauteng (2005-2013). Informal AIDS care and specialist oncology nursing are contrasting case studies of male care work presented in this paper. Findings suggest that caregiving men interviewed for this study act in gender disruptive ways and face a stigmatising social backlash in post-colonial South Africa. Oncology nursing has a professional cachet denied to informal sector caregivers. This professional status acts as a class-based insulator against oppressive gender-based stigma, for oncology nursing more closely aligns to an idealised masculinity. The closer to a ‘respectable’ middle-class identity, or bourgeois civility, the better for these men who idealise traditionally white, male, formal sector occupations. However, this insulating effect relies on a denial of emotional aspects of care by male cancer nurses and a lack of activism around breaking down gendered notions of care work. Forming a guild of informal sector AIDs caregivers could add much-needed professional recognition and provide an organisational base for gender norm disruption through activism. This may help to retain more men in informal sector caregiving roles and challenge the norms that are used to stigmatise male caregiving work in general.
- Full Text:
The cultural politics of adaptation : fools and the politics of gender
- Authors: Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo
- Date: 2015-04-01
- Subjects: Gender , Masculinity , Spectatorship
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5594 , ISSN 1754923x , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14295
- Description: The shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe. This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo
- Date: 2015-04-01
- Subjects: Gender , Masculinity , Spectatorship
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5594 , ISSN 1754923x , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14295
- Description: The shifts in the priorities of literary and cultural theory and criticism were already underway in the South African academy by the end of the 1980s, with the gathering momentum of the mass political movement reaching its apotheosis with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Whereas creative literary and cultural expression has often lagged behind advances in theory, there was nevertheless a steady acknowledgement of the necessity for a corresponding shift in the discursive character of the creative arts, even if the material conditions on the ground remained largely unchanged. Ramadan Suleman’s film Fools, which appeared in 1997 as an adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 1983 novella by the same title, entered the fray with its argument for a new or, as it were, broader consciousness of the deeper, more complex legacy of ‘sexual violence’. This legacy included the weak ‘place of women in the everyday life of the township’ (Suleman 1995: 1), and indeed in the very idea of ‘the everyday’ that some in literary and cultural circles sought to inscribe. This article provides an assessment of the nature and extent of the film’s intervention in the context of the systematic breakdown of the old certainties of race, identity and nation post-apartheid, together with the literary-critical cultures and apparatuses that presided over their coherences and raptures. I take as my starting point Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s (1983: 3) assertion that ‘[a]though […] those questions bearing on the cinematic industry, its processes of production, distribution and exhibition’ – in short, questions bearing on ‘the contextual’ – are of ‘crucial importance’, they need to be tempered with those bearing on the ‘textual and intertextual’ (emphasis in original). Fools is a film that enters the textual and contextual terrain of Ndebele’s novella, but in doing so contests its textuality by shifting its narrative ground and voice.
- Full Text:
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