Southern African historiography has become increasingly gender‐sensitive in the last decade. Primarily as a result of the impact of feminism in the world of work and in universities, research on women has burgeoned. The inclusion of women in the study of the past and the recognition of their agency has filled an important lacuna but also has made evident the corresponding gap in knowledge about men. The dominance of men in the public record has obscured the fact that little is known about masculinity. Men have generally been treated in essentialist terms. The socially constructed nature of masculinity is widely acknowledged and it is this insight that needs to be applied to a study of the region's history. This article introduces readers to the inter‐disciplinary work on masculinity, reviews how research on gender in South Africa has handled issues of men and masculinity and then suggests how insights taken from Men's Studies might help to broaden gender analysis and enrich the study of the South African ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2637466.pdf

Of boys and men: masculinity and gender in Southern African studies

Although the literature on Africa increasingly adopts a gendered approach to sexual and reproductive health issues, few studies have addressed adolescent pregnancy and parenthood in such a framework. This article examines links between gender ideology or gender roles and the social impact of adolescent childbearing in the lives of rural and urban adolescents in KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa. It employs a triangulated research methodology (focus-group discussions, narrative role playing and discussions, and questionnaires and in-depth interviews) to inform an analysis of adolescents' notions of male and female gender ideals. This analysis forms the basis for an exploration of the potential influence of adolescent childbearing on young peoples' lives and factors that shape their sexual and reproductive well-being. Results indicate that gender ideals are grounded in traits that reinforce poor sexual negotiation dynamics and behavioral double standards and that place adolescents at risk for early pregnancy and other sexual and reproductive health complications. Overall, adolescent parenthood is viewed negatively by participants of both sexes because it compromises personal, professional, and financial aspirations. Compared with its effect on boys, parenthood has a disproportionate (and highly negative) impact on girls that is directly linked to gender-based inequities. The article addresses the research and policy implications of these findings.

How Gender Roles Influence Sexual and Reproductive Health Among South African Adolescents

Knowledge of the Body

KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa is currently the site of the world's fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, where it is estimated that between 30 and 40 percent of the adult population is seropositive for HIV. With support from local politicians and members of various government ministries, several self-styled guardians of tradition have emerged to form organizations that advocate and conduct regular virginity testing of girls. Reference to the current HIV/AIDS epidemic is central to calls for greater support of this practice. Drawing on original research among Zuluspeaking people in the periurban communities of Durban, this article examines the sociocultural construction of HIV/AIDS and locates the growing popularity of virginity testing within a gendered meaning-making process consistent with commonly held beliefs that the epidemic is the result of women being sexually "out of control." With the social impact of AIDS starting to take its toll in the forms of increasing AIDS-related deaths and a growing population of orphans, I argue that virginity testing is an attempt to manage the epidemic by exerting greater control over women and their sexuality. In addition, virginity testing of girls helps to draw attention away from the role of men in the maturing epidemic, consideration of which has been conspicuously absent in the popular discourse on AIDS at all levels of South African society. [HIV/AIDS, virginity, gender, South Africa]

Virginity testing: managing sexuality in a maturing HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In this paper I shall begin by outlining some of the political dimensions of the crisis understood in the conventional discourses of public health policy. Then I shall inquire as to how these dimensions might be complicated by the question of witchcraft. My method here will be somewhat abstract and hypothetical. Rather than an ethnographic description of AIDS and witchcraft in concrete circumstances I shall outline a general framework of presumptions and hypotheses within which discussion of matters relating to occult powers typically take place. Given certain elementary propositions concerning the nature and action of invisible power that I shall call the "witchcraft paradigm" (which I shall stress is by no means irrationality or superstition) I shall suggest that it is entirely plausible for people suffering from diseases related to AIDS to interpret their afflictions as a form of witchcraft. I shall examine some of the ways in which HIV/AIDS can in fact be interpreted as witchcraft and shall present preliminary evidence to suggest that many people actually do interpret their illness this way. Following this we shall be in a position to begin investigating possible social and political implications of such modes of interpretation. (excerpt)

An Epidemic of Witchcraft? The Implications of AIDS for the Post-Apartheid State

Divinities the shades the shades brood over men diviners - servants of the shades communion with the shades anger and fertility as expressions of power resisting evil medicines inversions and funerary reversals.

Axel-Ivar Berglund

Papers

Zulu thought-patterns and symbolism