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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Angry men and working women: gender, violence and economic change in Qwaqwa in the 1980s
Author:Bank, LeslieISNI
Year:1994
Periodical:African Studies
Volume:53
Issue:1
Pages:89-113
Language:English
Geographic terms:South Africa
Qwaqwa
Subjects:gender relations
employment
Women's Issues
Labor and Employment
Economics and Trade
Development and Technology
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Law, Human Rights and Violence
economics
Cultural Roles
Marital Relations and Nuptiality
Family Life
External link:https://doi.org/10.1080/00020189408707790
Abstract:This paper is based on research carried out in Qwaqwa in the 1980s by members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. It contextualizes and explains an extraordinary incidence of public violence which occurred in Qwaqwa in the mid-1980s and which involved a collective assault on working women by unemployed men in the homeland's capital Phuthaditjhaba. The author argues that it is useful to conceptualize male domination in Qwaqwa as a 'patchwork quilt of patriarchies' rather than as a single coherent system of control. The paper begins with the experiences of farm and urban families prior to their arrival in Qwaqwa. It shows that earlier forms of patriarchal control were being eroded on the eve of relocation in the 1970s. Relocation to Qwaqwa, however, made it possible for men to revive older patriarchal notions as heads of bantustan households. By the 1980s conditions in the bantustan had changed once again, suddenly eroding the material basis of existing forms of patriarchal control. This leads the author to a materialist explanation for the men's riot. To explain why the riot was led by unemployed men from the closer settlement villages and why they used violence, the author considers other theoretical approaches which relate gender, violence and identity politics to one another. Ref., sum.
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