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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa
Author:Thomas, Lynn M.ISNI
Year:2006
Periodical:The Journal of African History
Volume:47
Issue:3
Period:November
Pages:461-490
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:black women
gender roles
newspapers
History and Exploration
Women's Issues
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
Ethnic and Race Relations
mass media
Historical/Biographical
Cultural Roles
Sex Roles
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/4501073
Abstract:This essay rethinks the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa by deploying the heuristic device of the 'modern girl' to consider how global circuits of representation and commerce informed this period of gender tumult. By analysing a beauty contest in the South African newspaper 'Bantu World' in 1933 together with articles and letters on, and advertisements for, cosmetics, the essay demonstrates how, in white-dominated segregationist South Africa, the 'modern girl' emerged through and posed challenges to categories of race and respectability. The modern girl heuristic elucidates how female figures identified by a cosmopolitan look, an explicit eroticism and the use of specific commodities surfaced in many parts of the globe, and how their near-simultaneous emergence was tied to the international circulation of commodity cultures, mass media and political discourses. The modern girl's presence in 'Bantu World''s beauty competition and cosmetics discussions reveals that black South African women were implicated in such circuits earlier - by the early 1930s - than previous scholarship has suggested. Notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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