Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology by Floretta Boonzaier, Taryn Van Niekerk
Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology by Floretta Boonzaier, Taryn Van Niekerk
Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology by Floretta Boonzaier, Taryn Van Niekerk
Floretta Boonzaier
Taryn van Niekerk Editors
Decolonial
Feminist
Community
Psychology
Community Psychology
Series Editors:
Mohamed Seedat
Institute for Social & Health Sciences, University of South Africa,
Ormonde, South Africa
Shahnaaz Suffla
Violence Injury and Peace Research, University South Africa-MRC,
Capetown, South Africa
The Community Psychology book series is envisaged as a space to review the
established assumptions and knowledge economy underlying community
psychology, and encourage writings that recognize the plurality of people and the
many geographical, psychological and sociological locations that they occupy. The
book series will enable contributors to stimulate thought that questions that which
is constructed as critical knowledges, community psychology, and the meanings of
liberation and community. Contributions to the book series draw attention to the
applications of community psychology in the Global South and the Global North
as they relate to such issues as violence, socio-economic inequality, racism, gender,
migration, dispossession, climate change, and disease outbreaks. In do so, it centers
community psychology as focused on the well-being of collectives, and dealing
with such focal issues as deploying psychology to support social justice, the
relevance and appropriateness of its internal logic, and methods that deal with the
range of psychological, social, cultural, economic, political, environmental,
epistemic, and local and global influences that bear on the quality of life of
individuals, communities and society. The book series concentrates thus on the
following three key areas of focus: 1) decoloniality, power and epistemic justice,
2) knowledge production, contestation and community psychology, and 3)
community psychology in context. The series is of vital and immediate relevance
to researchers, practitioners, faculty and students from the intervention sciences,
including anthropology, sociology, public health, development studies, social work
and urban studies
Decolonial Feminist
Community Psychology
Editors
Floretta Boonzaier Taryn van Niekerk
Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies
in Africa in Africa
Department of Psychology Department of Psychology
University of Cape Town University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, South Africa Rondebosch, South Africa
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This work is dedicated to those countless
feminist and decolonial scholars and
activists who have come before us, those who
are still with us and those who are still on
their way.
Acknowledgements
This book was a collaborative effort, emergent from many conversations and
engagements with our colleagues, friends, families and students, too many to men-
tion. We thank you all. We would like to acknowledge all the contributors to this
volume: Lutfiye Ali, Malvern Tatenda Chiweshe, Josephine Cornell, Brittany
Everitt-Penhale, Shose Kessi, Peace Kiguwa, Catriona Macleod, Nick Malherbe,
Haile Matutu, Jabulile Mary-Jane Jace Mavuso, Linda Mkhize, Puleng Segalo,
Tamara Shefer, Shahnaaz Suffla, and Gabriela Távara.
We extend our special thanks to the series editors, Mohamed Seedat and Shahnaaz
Suffla, who provided the encouragement, enthusiasm and support for this work. We
are deeply appreciative of Haile Matutu’s generous, meticulous and efficient labour
as editorial assistant on this project. We would also like to acknowledge the impor-
tance of our engagements in the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in the
Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, especially to our friend
and colleague, Shose Kessi, who is the co-director of the Hub.
We acknowledge the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Mellon
Foundation that provided us the financial support to travel, share and cultivate dia-
logue at various conferences around the volume’s thematic focus. We also thank the
University of Cape Town for the institutional support for the work.
A final and very special thanks go to Sean Daniels, Luke Daniels, Liam Daniels
and Bjorn Christ for their love and support.
vii
Contents
ix
x Contents
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 155
Contributors
xi
xii Contributors
Contents
owards a Feminist and Decolonial Community Psychology
T 2
Articulating a Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 5
Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology: An Ongoing Conversation 8
References 9
This volume is situated within the revitalised ‘decolonial turn’ in psychology, a turn
which has been argued to recentre critical approaches such as feminist, critical,
liberatory, indigenous, black and Marxist psychologies within the discipline (Seedat
and Suffla 2017). The colonial and imperialist roots of psychology are now almost
taken-for-granted in much critique of the discipline and the ways in which it
functions in the mainstream (e.g. Howitt and Owusu-Bempah 1994; Kessi and
Boonzaier 2018; Macleod et al. 2017). In the postcolonial period, psychology in
Africa (and elsewhere) has been argued to have ‘retreated into scientism’ involving
the uncritical application of western scientific methods to the study of African
people (Mama 1995). In reflecting on the post-liberation period on the African
continent Amina Mama (1995) has argued that:
“… (psychologists) seemed to have buried their head in the sand of empiricist methods,
travelling about the continent administering questionnaires and tests to obscurely defined
groups of subjects, and then using these to make all manner of generalisations about an
African subject who has remained entirely mythical.” (p. 38)
In South Africa in particular, the location from which a large part of the contribu-
tions to the book emerge, there has been longstanding recognition of the role of
psychology in enabling and justifying institutionalised racism through apartheid
(Nicholas and Cooper 1990). Given this history, as well as the contemporary ways
in which knowledge production within psychology continues to pathologise those
with long histories of suffering (Kessi and Boonzaier 2018), there is little argument
against the idea that psychology must indeed be decolonised. Everyday life in global
Southern contexts is steeped in inequalities, global capitalism, migration, refugee
crises, violence, migration, and dispossession that provide a rationale for adopting
a wide-angle approach to well-being and liberation. There is growing recognition
that the problems-in-contexts described as ‘postcolonial’ resonate with and emerge
from histories and ‘presents’ of imperialism, colonialism and metacolonialism
(Bulhan 2015), neoliberalism and hyper-capitalism. Despite technological advance-
ments that could be argued to bring people in diverse parts of the world closer
together, divisions between the global North and South have deepened and have
been maintained through the rise of neoliberalism, predatory hyper-capitalism, and
the institutionalisation of poverty though development imperatives (Escobar 1995).
At the same time, the dominance of hegemonic, Euro-American-centric modes of
theorising shapes knowledge economies in the South and often misrepresent or
speak over local knowledges. The lens of decoloniality is useful for recognition of
the continuities in the decimation, destruction and dispossession wrought by colo-
nialism and for challenging the ways it manifests in the present through knowledge
production, representation, and everyday life.
In this book, however, we make a case for feminist critique to be situated along-
side the decolonial critique of psychology, community psychology in particular. In
contemporary contexts, decolonisation discourses specifically centre racialised sub-
jectivity, to a large degree ignoring the ways in which this is intersected with other
forms of subjectivity and power, with gender being amongst the most important. The
book aims to bring together the strands of critique in knowledge production and theo-
ries, emergent methodologies and critical and reflexive community psychology prac-
tice to argue for a decolonial feminist community psychology.
1
We use the terms ‘womxn’ and ‘mxn’ to unsettle the essentialisation of normative notions of
gender and sex. Through these terms, we aim to centre the experiences of black womxn and mxn
located in the global South, as well as those who identify as transgender, intersex, queer and all
womxn and mxn who have found themselves erased from dominant norms of femininity and
masculinity.
4 F. Boonzaier and T. van Niekerk
is saved by white philanthropists and/or her ‘feminist sisters’ in the global North.
Through the imposition of western, white feminist values, womxn in the global
South are positioned as: “look[ing] to their liberated sisters in [Western] worlds for
rescue” (Kurtiş and Adams 2015, p. 389).
Despite the goal of feminist community psychology being to attain social justice,
the approach also presents with a number of problems, particularly in its mainstream
form. Currently, mainstream forms of feminist community psychology are regarded
as having much potential, yet are “designed to liberate a privileged few to participate
in the ongoing domination of the marginalized many” (Kurtiş and Adams 2015,
p. 389). It appears that feminist forms of community psychology have struggled to
free themselves from the shackles imposed by the domination of white, western
feminism. Scholars have moved these debates forward to imagine more critical,
liberatory agendas for feminist and community psychologies, which first and
foremost require engagements with a process of decolonization, and to importantly
liberate these scholarly practices and approaches from neo-colonial modes of doing
and thinking.
The work of Frantz Fanon (1967) presented an important historical turn in cri-
tiquing mainstream psychological science, moving the discipline towards a decolo-
nising agenda. In sidestepping the pathologizing and individualist mantras of
mainstream psychological science that position experiences of distress and
oppression as a product of the self, Fanon (1967) provided a situated understanding
of the psychological and emotional distress experienced by the colonised within the
oppressive structures of colonialism. Martín-Baró (1994) through his agenda for the
development of a liberation psychology, broke away from the individualising
agendas set forth by mainstream psychological thinking and instead cultivated a
consciousness of a community psychology praxes for the disenfranchised and one
with social justice at its centre. Since these early contributions, there have been a
range of works toward theorising the decolonisation of the discipline of psychology,
including its different branches such as community psychology. According to
Seedat and Suffla (2017) decolonising approaches to community psychology are
united by their:
“… attitudinal orientations that affirm situatedness, marginal voices, liberatory modes of
knowledge creation, ethico-reflexive praxes, non-hierarchical learning and teaching, and
dialogical community engagements, constantly intending to transcend the obsession with
formulaic methods” (p. 428)
2
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/13/racism-harvard-law-
school-slaveholder-seal
6 F. Boonzaier and T. van Niekerk
project served as a space for the womxn to actively reflect on their local knowledges
in relation to dominant development discourses that enter their community.
Importantly, the chapter engages with how womxn challenged western feminist
notions of the assumed victimhood of indigenous Others by subverting ideas about
the assumed passivity of womxn who actively take up subjective positions as
‘mothers’ or those involved in assumed ‘feminine’ tasks such as knitting. Womxn
reclaimed these meanings and actively construct themselves as the producers of
knowledge about their own lives. This work resonates with the earlier arguments
about how western feminist discourse positions womxn in the global South as
“singular monolithic subjects” (Mohanty 1988, p.333) without agency.
Our chapter follows on from Mavuso and colleagues’ and Távara’s contributions
that engage with methodologies that have the potential to exemplify a decolonial
feminist community psychology, this time within the context of research on intimate
partner violence. Given the high levels of mxn’s violence in the context of intimate
heterosexual relationships, a focus on transgenerational traumas and the epistemic
violences enacted on people is required. We suggest that these relationships can be
interrogated through life history methodologies on the lives of black mxn who have
been historically oppressed, and who currently perpetrate partner violence against
womxn. Importantly, we attempt to bring into view the complex intricacies of
privilege and disadvantage that shape their lives through our reflections on the
application of the life history methodology with two mxn. Fundamentally, we
engage with and begin a critical dialogue around what it means to humanise research
participants, particularly marginalised black mxn who have been positioned in
research and public discourse as inherently violent, isolating their very racialised
and classed identities as ‘risk factors’ for violence. We thus foreground potential
opportunities offered through the life history approach and what that might mean
for a decolonial feminist community psychology as well as its capacity for
challenging normalised ways of doing and for consciousness-raising.
Decolonial feminist work involves ongoing critique, including the critique of
approaches that are assumed to be liberatory. Participatory action research is an
established method within community psychology that is informed by liberatory
ideas around participation, consciousness and social change. Although these ideas
are central to decolonial feminist work, the methods by themselves cannot be
assumed to be inherently progressive. In the fourth chapter of this volume, Cornell,
Mkhize and Kessi critically interrogate the participatory dimension of a photovoice
process. They reflect on a photovoice process from three varying positions of power,
the academic research supervisor, the postgraduate student researcher and the
research participant. This interrogation of ‘participation’ is an important critique
because, although participants are frequently regarded as co-researchers and
included in the research process (usually the data collection phase) they rarely
participate in the scholarly dissemination of the work, being excluded from the
production of knowledge more broadly. Cornell and colleagues’ chapter also
amplifies an issue that is rarely articulated in academic writing, namely an illustration
of the process of intergenerational feminist mentorship – work that is fundamental
to nurturing the next generation of feminist, decolonial scholars.
Introducing Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 7
When we put out a call for contributions to this volume we had envisaged receiving
contributions that would help us to develop and envision an emerging decolonial
feminist community psychology. We had not imagined that such a form of psychology
already exists. The contributions to this volume illustrates that a decolonial feminist
community psychology is already here. This decolonial feminist community
psychology takes questions of activism seriously, begins with decolonial and
feminist theorising from the global South, engages critical reflexivity and critical
ethical reflexivity, is anti-essentialist, acknowledges multiplicity and intersectionality,
centres the voices and concerns of the disenfranchised, deconstructs notions of
community, considers issues of representation and whose interests might be served
by the work. We consider the development of this work as ongoing and we are
pleased to have begun this conversation.
Introducing Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 9
References
Ampofo, A. A. (2010). One who has truth – She has strength: The feminist activist inside and
outside the academy in Ghana. In A. A. Ampofo & S. Arnfred (Eds.), African feminist poli-
tics of knowledge: Tensions, challenges and possibilities (pp. 28–51). Uppsala: Nordiska
Afrikainstitutet.
Arnfred, S., & Ampofo, A. A. (2010). Introduction: Feminist politics of knowledge. In A. A.
Ampofo & S. Arnfred (Eds.), African feminist politics of knowledge: Tensions, challenges and
possibilities (pp. 5–27). Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Bulhan, H. (2015). Stages of colonialism in Africa: From occupation of land to occupation of
being. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3(1), 239–256.
Connell, R. (2014). Thinking gender from the south. Feminist Studies, 40(3), 518–539.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton University Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.
Hanlin, C. E., Bess, K., Conway, P., Evans, S. D., McCown, D., Prilleltensky, I., & Perkins, D. D.
(2008). Community psychology. In C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds.), The SAGE hand-
book of qualitative research in psychology (pp. 524–540). London: Sage Publications.
Hooks, B. (2015). Ain’t I a woman. Black women and feminism. New York: Routledge.
Howitt, D., & Owusu-Bempah, J. (1994). The racism of psychology: Time for change. New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Kessi, S., & Boonzaier, F. (2017). Resistance and transformation in postcolonial contexts. In
C. Howarth & E. Andreouli (Eds.), The social psychology of everyday politics (pp. 116–130).
London: Routledge.
Kessi, S., & Boonzaier, F. (2018). Centre/ing decolonial feminist psychology in Africa. South
Africa Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 299–309.
Kurtiş, T., & Adams, G. (2015). Decolonizing liberation: Toward a transnational feminist psychol-
ogy. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3(1), 388–413. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.
v3i1.326.
Lewis, D. (2011). Representing African sexualities. In S. Tamale (Ed.), African sexualities: A
reader (pp. 199–216). Cape Town: Pambazuka.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–749.
Macleod, C., Bhatia, S., & Kessi, S. (2017). Postcolonialsim and psychology: Growing interest
and promising potential. In C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of
qualitative research in psychology (2nd ed., pp. 306–317). Los Angeles: SAGE.
Mama, A. (1995). Beyond the masks: Race, gender, and subjectivity. New York: Routledge.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist
Review, 30, 65–88.
Nelson, G., & Prilleltensky, I. (Eds.). (2010). Community psychology: In pursuit of liberation and
well-being (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholas, L. J., & Cooper, S. (1990). Psychology & Apartheid. Johannesburg: Vision Publications.
Omar, Y. (2016). Trans collective stops RMF exhibition. Monday Paper, University of Cape Town.
http://www.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=9620 (Accessed 29 Oct 2016).
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender dis-
courses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rappaport, J. (1977). Community psychology: Values, research, and action. California: Harcourt
School.
Rutherford, A. (2018). Feminism, psychology, and the gendering of neoliberal subjectiv-
ity: From critique to disruption. Theory & Psychology, 28(5), 619–644. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0959354318797194.
10 F. Boonzaier and T. van Niekerk
Seedat, M., & Suffla, S. (2017). Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies
and decolonisation. South Africa Journal of Psychology, 47(4), 421–431.
Seedat, M., Duncan, N., & Lazarus, S. (2001). Introduction. In M. Seedat, N. Duncan, & S. Lazarus
(Eds.), Community psychology: Theory, method, and practice – South African and other per-
spectives (pp. 1–14). Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Yen, J. (2008). A history of community psychology in South Africa. In C. van Ommen & D. Painter
(Eds.), Interiors: A history of psychology in South Africa (pp. 385–412). Cape Town: Unisa
Press.
Overcoming Essentialism in Community
Psychology: The Use of a Narrative-
Discursive Approach Within African
Feminisms
Jabulile Mary-Jane Jace Mavuso , Malvern Tatenda Chiweshe ,
and Catriona Ida Macleod
Contents
Introduction 11
Community Psychology and Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 13
African Feminisms 14
African Postcolonial/Poststructural Feminism 15
A Narrative-Discursive Approach in African Feminisms 17
Our Studies: Abortion Decision-Making and Pre-Abortion Counselling Experiences 19
Transforming Pre-Abortion Counselling Policy 23
Conclusion 24
References 25
Introduction
Given the history of race- and gender-based colonialism in Africa, racial and gen-
dered power relations are key issues to be tackled in community psychology inter-
ventions in general, but also crucially in those dealing with gendered practices such
as sexual violence, unsafe abortion, circumcision and virginity testing, for example.
1
We use the term ‘womxn’ and (‘mxn’) to disrupt normative assumptions about gender and sex,
here taken to be socially constructed, which write gender and sex onto individuals. The term
‘womxn’ denotes and recognises all persons with the biological capacity to become pregnant
(because the studies discussed here are around abortion), including transgender, intersex, womxn-
identifying and mxn-identifying persons. We also use this term to foreground the experiences of
womxn of colour, womxn from/living in the Global South, trans, queer and intersex womxn, and
all womxn-identifying persons who have been excluded from dominant constructions of ‘woman-
hood’ and feminist praxis on the subject
2
The term Global South refers to countries from Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia
including the Middle East which face serious problems and challenges as a result of geopolitical
processes of colonialism and imperialism. The term is however, problematic as it can homogenise
various countries.
3
Western feminism is also a potentially problematic term and to avoid any misconceptions its use
here refers to feminism from the first world countries or the so-called Western world. When we use
the term ‘Western feminists’ we are not trying to imply that the view from this part of the world is
monolithic by any means but rather we are following in the footsteps of Mohanty (1991, p. 52) who
states that, “I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies
used by writers which codify Others as non-western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western”
in reference to Western feminists.
Overcoming Essentialism in Community Psychology: The Use… 13
upon and within the social world. Our approach enables, we argue, understandings
of African womxn’s experiences and resistances which are informed by definitions
of racial identity and culture, womxnhood, and social reality as dynamic social con-
cepts and practices. These kinds of understandings facilitate community psychol-
ogy interventions that are relevant and ‘emancipatory’ as they stem from the
multiplicity of participants’ narrated experiences and the social and discursive
power relations implicit in these narratives.
In the following, we discuss decolonial feminist community psychology as a
transformative approach. We describe the specific decolonial approaches we used
and the methodology deployed in our studies to provide a case for utilising a
narrative-discursive approach within African feminisms, thus enabling a framework
that reads similarities and differences, and oppressions and resistances in African
womxn’s experiences. We conclude by demonstrating, by way of a policy brief that
has been developed into a step-by-step abortion counselling guide, how the results
of a robust narrative-discursive analysis may be used to meaningfully impact on and
improve the lives of those beyond our research participants.
African Feminisms
African (and Global South) feminisms share a historical (and to a lesser extent,
contemporary) commitment to a just representation of those who have historically
been, and still continue to be, mal-represented in academic knowledge production
that remains skewed towards Global North resources and scholarship (Blay 2008).
These mal-representations, which maintain the very systems that create oppression,
tend to include an essentialised and rigid portrayal of womxn from/living in Global
South countries which tends to be a negative one in which ‘the Global South womxn’
lacks agency, is dominated by those with whom they are in relationships of power
and is consequently always already the ‘oppressed victim’ (Wilson 2011).
In attempting to correct these mal-representations, however, some African femi-
nist approaches (see discussion in Salo 2001) have themselves produced essen-
tialised and rigid accounts, albeit in different ways, of ‘the African womxn’s
experience’. For example, some authors have written about motherhood as a
defining value in African cultures (see Chilisa and Ntseane 2010) as opposed to
mothernormativity, an organising normative expectation that governs societies
(Tamale 2006). Such approaches notwithstanding, a strength of contemporary
African feminisms is their commitment to shedding light on local realities as
experienced by African peoples, particularly womxn and girls, and as shaped by
“specific contexts, cultures and peoples” (Chilisa and Ntseane 2010, p.619). This
has meant, in South Africa and other parts of Africa, an attunement to, and
theorisation around, how oppressions may be raced, classed and gendered in
intersecting and interacting ways (de la Rey 2001). In South Africa, for example,
feminist efforts include an understanding of the raced and classed barriers to access
to equitable healthcare and healthcare service delivery (including abortion, ante-
and postnatal care), among many other concerns.
We argue that the narrative-discursive method we employ here allows for
grounded analyses that expose the multiplicities of African womxn’s lives, as well
as the local and global power relations that serve to constrain or enable particular
experiences. This method falls within the broad area of African postcolonial/post-
structural feminist approaches, which we briefly describe below.
Overcoming Essentialism in Community Psychology: The Use… 15
4
Materiality as a concept is variously understood in the feminist literature as referring, perhaps
most notably, to economic conditions and resources and to lived experiences of being a body (the
embodiment literature speaks to this), but also to objects (nature, tools, buildings and structures,
and technological objects), space and time, and non-discursive practices (Rahman and Witz 2003).
5
Macleod (2016) introduces the construct ‘unsupportability’ as one which, unlike the oft-used
term ‘unintended’ (often conflated with ‘unwanted’) locates pregnancies within social, structural
and individual contexts which are seen to intersect.
Overcoming Essentialism in Community Psychology: The Use… 17
African feminists have recognised the importance of analysing narratives (see, for
example, Kashyap 2009) and discourses (see, for example, McFadden 2002) in
highlighting gendered oppressions. In our work, we have combined the strengths of
these kinds of analyses: the more micro-analytical work enabled by narrative
analyses, and the more macro-analytical labour enabled through discursive analyses.
In the rest of the chapter, we demonstrate how using Taylor and Littleton’s (2006)
narrative-discursive method enables the kind of African feminism elucidated upon.
Within our work, discourse is understood as both constraining and productive in
constructing objects/social practices and particular selves which relate to objects/
social practices in particular ways (Foucault 1972). Ultimately, discourse acts upon
individuals in ways which render individuals knowable and governable, whether in
constraining or productive ways (Foucault 1977). Critical discursive approaches,
including Taylor and Littleton’s narrative-discursive approach and Davies and
Harré’s (2001) positioning theory, extend this understanding of discourse to allow
for individuals to ‘act upon’ discourse making the process of subject formation a
bidirectional one. Thus, individuals use discourse to position themselves and others
in particular ways. However, the ability to do so is constrained and made possible
by the availability (and dominance) of particular discourses. This understanding of
discourse and the relationship between discourse and individuals is captured in the
concept of discursive resources.
Discursive resources may be understood as culturally-specific features of talk
which are made available by and within an individual’s socio-cultural context or
community (Reynolds and Taylor 2005). They constitute an individuals’ discursive
environment and thus shape what can be said and in what ways. However, as the
word ‘resources’ implies, within a narrative-discursive approach, these features of
talk may be actively drawn upon and used by individuals for specific ends and goals,
for example, to position themselves or others in particular ways, or to justify a
practice, defend against expressed or anticipated criticism and so on (Reynolds and
Taylor 2005). As Taylor (2015, p. 10) states: discursive resources “amount to a
historically accrued but ever-changing pool of meanings, associations and even
patterns of words which pre-exist talk on a topic or issue and shape what is (and is
not) sayable and said about it”. Discursive resources include ideas, images,
assumptions and expectations about objects and social practices. In our extension of
Taylor and Littleton’s approach, we view discourses, as well as narratives, as
resources to be taken up by speakers in their talk and writings (Taylor 2015).
Within Taylor and Littleton’s (2006) narrative-discursive approach, narratives
are “a construction, in talk, of sequence or consequence“(p. 95). This highlights two
aspects of narratives. The notion of ‘sequence’ implies a temporal ordering of events
and may be communicated minimally through words such as “and then” or through
references to time (past, present and future). The concept of ‘consequence’ refers to
18 J. M. J. Mavuso et al.
Our first study used a Foucauldian postcolonial African feminist approach, read
through a narrative-discursive approach, to explore Zimbabwean womxn’s and
health service providers’ narratives of abortion decision-making. The data for the
study were collected from three sites in Harare, Zimbabwe. The three sites were
Harare Hospital, Epworth and Mufakose. Because Zimbabwe currently has
restrictive abortion laws, womxn’s abortion decision-making narratives could only
be accessed retrospectively. Thus, the 18 womxn (six at each site) who participated
in an adaptation of Wengraf’s (2001) narrative interview method had (clandestinely)
terminated pregnancies in the year prior to data collection (2013–2014). Semi-
structured interviews were conducted with six service providers (two nurses at
Harare Hospital, two village health workers in Epworth and two nurses in Mufakose).
The six service providers who were interviewed were recruited precisely for their
experience in working with womxn who have terminated pregnancies [for a fuller
explanation, see Chiweshe (2016)].
One of the main findings of the study was that when narrating their abortion
stories, the womxn spoke in a socially-sanctioned manner. One of the discursive
resources employed by the womxn, was a discourse of ‘shame/stigma’. Shame and
stigma, which were seen to be important in determining what makes a pregnancy
unsupportable, and also an abortion complicated, can be viewed as a way of
sanctioning what is allowed and what is forbidden in the particular context. Shame
and stigma are used to discipline womxn’s bodies regarding their sexuality – making
pregnancies unsupportable by shaming womxn who get pregnant outside marriage
and also those who have an abortion. This sanctioning is attached to gendered
understandings – womxn being responsible for ensuring that pregnancy occurs only
‘within’ a heterosexual conjugal relationship and womxn accepting their
reproductive role should pregnancy occur.
In their interview talk, then, womxn spoke of how they were caught in a double-
bind, where the circumstances of a pregnancy could be viewed as shameful and
abortion was also viewed as stigmatised/stigmatising. The double-bind creates a
dilemma concerning what is culturally and morally acceptable, with both keeping a
pregnancy under certain circumstances (single parenthood, relationships outside of
marriage, fatherless children) and proceeding with an abortion being seen as morally
reprehensible. While both options were depicted as bad, womxn proceeded with an
abortion because it could be hidden, whereas a pregnancy could not. The fear
surrounding community members finding out about the abortion meant womxn did
not present for post abortion care if they experienced complications. Here it is
precisely the double-edged nature of shame/stigma (‘incorrect’ pregnancies and
abortion) that contributes to the regulation of womxn’s reproductive behaviour.
Society is seen in the womxn’s micro-narratives as having the means (through
stigma/shame) of disciplining those who act contrary to the social norms.
20 J. M. J. Mavuso et al.
other womxn and healthcare providers while waiting to receive counselling and/or
their abortion procedure. Healthcare workers (two nurses, and 2 volunteer
counsellors) were asked about their experiences of providing counselling
(information provision and decision-making aspects) and their experiences of
interactions with womxn in the waiting room (Mavuso 2018).
Through moralisation discourses, abortion was predominantly constructed by
womxn and healthcare providers as immoral, with some participants drawing on a
religious discourse to construct it as sinful as well. Womxn were thus positioned
(and positioned themselves) as deviant and as committing a wrongful act while
healthcare providers positioned themselves as saving womxn from abortion. For
healthcare providers, the immorality of abortion was tied to some providers’
expectations of the embodiment of shame where womxn were expected to be visibly
ashamed, through their posture, facial expressions and demeanour, of what they
were about to do. Using an awfulisation of abortion discourse (Hoggart 2015;
Wahlström 2013), abortion was constructed as risky, dangerous and harmful to both
womxn and foetus. This positioned both womxn and the foetus as vulnerable and
under threat and as needing to be saved from this threat. Notably, however, the
construction of abortion as threatening to the foetus carried the implication of
positioning womxn as a threat to, instead of protector of, the foetus. The risks of
abortion stated by healthcare providers included a risk of contracting cancer, risk of
infertility, as well as the certainty of mental or psychological ill-health.
Importantly, some participants challenged normative discourses around the
immorality and shamefulness of abortion. Thus, one healthcare provider normalised
and rationalised womxn’s embodiment of happiness which is significant in going
against the normative expectation that womxn should not only feel sad and ashamed
but should visibly embody this before, during and after having an abortion. Related
to this, and equally important, was that some womxn constructed a micro-narrative
of ‘We were chatting/sharing stories’ in which womxn described how their embodied
experiences of being together in the waiting room and sharing their stories about
abortion led to feeling comfort, solace and strength, and to a normalisation of
abortion as part of the everyday. For some womxn, these conversations provided a
counter discourse to the awfulisation of abortion, moralisation and pronatalist
discourses drawn upon by healthcare providers in their counselling practices. To the
extent that womxn also took up these discourses during interviews, experiences of
these waiting room conversations may also have enabled womxn to not only begin
to view abortion differently, but also may have mitigated against the shame, guilt,
and emotional difficulty which is produced by dominant constructions of abortion
(Kimport et al. 2011) and which was experienced by some of the womxn in this
study. The micro-narrative of ‘We were chatting/sharing stories’, then, highlights
how materiality, in this case referring to embodiment, may shape, in a transformative
and subversive way, taken-for-granted discursive and social practices (i.e. not only
how abortion is constructed but also the experience of obtaining an abortion).
Womxn’s micro-narratives also spoke to how the materialities of their lives
shaped their decision to have an abortion. Thus, womxn spoke about how the
economic realities of their lives (such as being the sole economic provider and being
22 J. M. J. Mavuso et al.
adoption) or be economically productive and independent but not both. Some of our
participants were similarly constrained by these oppressions.
Lastly, the different legal contexts of our two studies and their implication in
terms of the data produced, further highlights the patriarchal oppressions womxn
face at the level of policy and legislation. In our Zimbabwean data, restrictive laws
on abortion meant that womxn had to terminate their pregnancies using unsafe and
potentially dangerous methods, a decision which participants framed as a choice
between two undesirable options: an unsupportable pregnancy and/or (deepened)
poverty on the one hand, and the possibility of serious ill health or death on the
other.
Through one of our studies which explored womxn’s and healthcare providers’
experiences of pre-abortion counselling, and a partner study which analysed
recordings of the pre-abortion counselling sessions, we were able to make visible
the discourses and power relations underpinning the counselling practices as well as
the narratives or voiced experiences of womxn who participated in the counselling
sessions.
These findings will be used in the training of healthcare providers who provide
pre-termination of pregnancy counselling. Based on the above-mentioned research,
the first and last author and another co-author initially put together a policy brief
which identifies counselling practices which were found in the research to be:
harmful to some womxn; emotionally burdensome to some healthcare workers
providing the counselling; or useful to both womxn and healthcare providers
(Mavuso et al. 2017). In producing the policy brief, we made no assumptions about
womxn’s essential experiences of counselling or termination of pregnancy, but
highlighted, based on the stories produced in the research, how divergent the
womxn’s experiences of the pregnancy and counselling are and how, given this,
flexibility is needed in the counselling encounter. Noting the discourses drawn on
by the participants in describing their experiences (e.g. awfulisation of abortion;
moralisation of abortion), we recommended counselling processes that serve to
undermine these discourses (e.g. normalising abortion as a standard medical
procedure). Thus, the methodology that we used in our research allowed us to
integrate personal narratives and social dynamics in our recommendations for
abortion counselling.
This policy brief has been developed into a step-by-step counselling guide for
healthcare workers providing abortion counselling. The intention is that it will be
used to train healthcare providers and be implemented to provide abortion counsel-
ling that does not produce the very harm that counselling expressly sets out to allevi-
ate or prevent. The result of deploying a critical African feminist narrative-discursive
approach within decolonial feminist community psychology praxes is that abortion
counselling may be re-imagined in a way that helps both womxn who receive coun-
24 J. M. J. Mavuso et al.
selling and those who conduct counselling. This is because it is based on an analysis
which avoids essentialism and homogenisation, and because it brings the individual
and the social together and enables an analysis of the interactions between the two.
Although the programme is in its early stages and no evaluation has been conducted,
we are confident that the integration of our theoretical approach, our narrative-dis-
cursive methodology into the recommendations, guidelines and training material will
bear some fruit in terms of providing pre-termination of pregnancy counselling that
empowers womxn in their reproductive lives and bodily integrity.
Conclusion
and emancipatory are possible when they start from the myriad and complex
experiences of individuals and communities. These experiences can only be
accessed through theoretical and methodological approaches to knowledge
production that are steeped in an understanding of historical, social and discursive
processes which shape individuals’ lives and are in turn shaped by individuals.
Applying this to community psychology will ensure not only that the field maintains
a critical, self-reflective outlook but that it also achieves its emancipatory and
transformative goals.
Acknowledgments This work is based on research supported by the South African Research
Chairs initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation
of South Africa, grant no. 87582.
References
Azim, F., Menon, N., & Siddiqi, D. M. (2009). Negotiating new terrains: South Asian feminisms.
Feminist Review, 91(1), 1–8.
Bakare-Yusuf, B. (2003). Beyond determinism: The phenomenology of African female existence.
Feminist Africa, 2(1). Retrieved from, http://feministafrica.org/index.php/beyond-determinism.
Blay, Y. A. (2008). All the ‘Africans’ are men, all the “Sistas” are “American,” but some of us
resist: Realizing African feminism(s) as an Africological research methodology. The Journal
of Pan African Studies, 2(2), 58–73.
Blommaert, J. (2006). Applied ethnopoetics. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 181–190.
Burkitt, I. (1999). Bodies of thought: Embodiment, identity and modernity. California: Thousand
Oaks.
Chilisa, B., & Ntseane, G. (2010). Resisting dominant discourses: Implications of indigenous,
African feminist theory and methods for gender and education research. Gender and Education,
22(6), 617–632.
Chiweshe, M. T. (2016). A narrative-discursive analysis of abortion decision-making in Zimbabwe
(Unpublished Doctoral thesis). Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
Cruz, M. R., & Sonn, C. C. (2015). (De)colonizing culture in community psychology: Reflections
from critical social science. Decolonizing “multicultural” counselling through social justice.
New York: Springer.
Davies, B., & Harré, R. (2001). Positioning: The discursive position of selves. Discourse, Theory
& Practice: A Reader, 20(1), 261–288.
de la Rey, C. (2001). South African feminism, race and racism. Agenda, 13(32), 6–10.
Foucault, M. (1969/1972). The archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language (trans
Sheridan, A.M.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin.
Grabe, S., Grose, R. G., & Dutt, A. (2014). Women’s land ownership and relationship power: A
mixed methods approach to understanding structural inequities and violence against women.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1–13.
Hoggart, L. (2015). Abortion counselling in Britain: Understanding the controversy. Sociology
Compass, 9(5), 365–378.
Kashyap, R. (2009). Narrative and truth: A feminist critique of the South African truth and recon-
ciliation commission. Contemporary Justice Review, 12(4), 449–467.
Kimport, K., Foster, K., & Weitz, T. A. (2011). Social sources of women’s emotional difficulty after
abortion: Lessons from women’s abortion narratives. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive
Health, 43(2), 103–109.
26 J. M. J. Mavuso et al.
Macleod, C. (2002). Economic security and the social science literature on teenage pregnancy in
South Africa. Gender & Society, 16(5), 647–664.
Macleod, C. I. (2016). Public reproductive health and ‘unintended’ pregnancies: Introducing the
construct ‘supportability’. Journal of Public Health, 38(3), e384–e391.
Mavuso, J. M. J. (2018). Narratives of the pre-abortion counselling healthcare encounter in
the eastern Cape public health sector. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Rhodes University,
Grahamstown, South Africa.
Mavuso, J. M. J., du Toit, R., & Macleod, C. (2017). Revamping pre-abortion counselling in South
Africa. Unpublished policy brief document, Critical studies in sexualities and reproduction,
Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
McFadden, P. (2002). Impunity, masculinity and heterosexism in the discourse on male endanger-
ment: An African feminist perspective. Working Paper Series Issue 7, Cave Hill, Barbados:
Centre for Gender and Development.
Mekgwe, P. (2008). Theorising African feminisms. QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy,
11–22.
Mohanty, C. T. (1991). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In C. T.
Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres, Third World women and the politics of feminism (pp.51-81).
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
O’Donovan, D. (2006). Moving away from “falling boys” and “passive girls”: Gender meta-
narratives in gender equity policies for Australian schools and why micro-narratives provide a
better policy model. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(4), 475–495.
Rahman, M., & Witz, A. (2003). What really matters: The elusive quality of the material in femi-
nist thought. Feminist Theory, 4, 243–261.
Reynolds, J., & Taylor, S. (2005). Narrating singleness: Life stories and deficit identities. Narrative
Inquiry, 15(2), 197–215.
Salo, E. (2001). Talking about feminism in Africa. Agenda, 16(50), 58–63.
Tamale, S. (2003). Out of the closet: Unveiling sexuality discourses in Uganda. Feminist Africa,
2(1), 1–7.
Tamale, S. (2006). African feminism: How should we change? Development, 49(1), 38–41.
Tamale, S. (2011). Researching and theorising sexualities in Africa. In S. Corrêa, R. de la Dehesa,
& R. Parker (Eds.), Sexuality and politics: Regional dialogues from the global South (Vol. 1,
pp. 16–62). Rio de Janeiro: Sexuality Policy Watch.
Taylor, S. (2015). Discursive and psychosocial? Theorising a complex contemporary subject.
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12(1), 8–21.
Taylor, S., & Littleton, K. (2006). Biographies in talk: A narrative-discursive research approach.
Qualitative Sociology Review, 2(1), 22–38.
Thompson, L., Rickett, B., & Day, K. (2017). Feminist relational discourse analysis: Putting the
personal in the political in feminist research. Qualitative Research in Psychology., 15, 93–115.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2017.1393586.
Wahlström, H. (2013). Reproduction, politics, and John Irving’s the cider house rules: Women’s
rights or “fetal rights”? Culture Unbound, 5(1), 251–271.
Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative research interviewing: Biographic narrative and semi structured
method. London: Sage Publications.
Wilson, K. (2011). ‘Race’, ‘gender’, and ‘neoliberalism’: Changing visual representations in
development. Third World Quarterly, 32(2), 315–331.
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic
Discourses Through Feminist Participatory
Action Research in Peru: Towards
a Feminist Decolonial Praxis
Gabriela Távara
Contents
Andean Women’s Marginalisation and Resistance in Peru’s Racial, Class, and Gender
Hierarchies 28
Feminist Participatory Action Research with Andean Women 31
Andean Women’s Engagement With External (Western) Ideas Through Feminist PAR 33
Concluding Thought and Recommendations 38
References 40
Peru, as many other countries that were once European colonies, is one in which its
colonial past is still very present permeating its social fabric and giving place to
racialised interactions that marginalise several non-white groups, particularly indig-
enous Andean people. Moreover, due to the entrenched patriarchal dynamics present
in Peruvian society, Andean women are even more vulnerable to this marginalisa-
tion, which is evidenced by the ongoing conditions of material poverty many of
them continue to face. In this scenario, oftentimes professionals work with Andean
women in social and economic projects that seek to promote their development and
wellbeing. Although well intentioned, through these projects professionals might be
unknowingly reproducing colonial and patriarchal dynamics by not incorporating
Andean women’s knowledge (s) and by privileging ideas and practices informed by
their disciplinary training, which is largely rooted in western knowledge.
This chapter presents some reflections drawn from a Feminist Participatory
Action Research (PAR) project in which I worked with a group of Andean women.
G. Távara (*)
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru
e-mail: [email protected]
The marginalisation of Andean people is deeply threaded into Peru’s social fabric.
This marginalisation reflects racism that is rooted in colonialism, but which still
persists today, although in slightly different forms. Although colonialism as a
political system has ended, we can still see its social and economic effects in Peru
(Quijano 2000). Most of those who live in rural areas and are dedicated to agricultural
activities earn very little for their work, and are Andean people; while those who
hold most positions of economic, social and political power, with some exceptions,
are mestizo or white (Thorp and Paredes 2011). However, being white or mestizo
does not depend exclusively on phenotypic elements; these ethnic differences
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 29
include symbolic and cultural elements as well. In the Peruvian social hierarchy,
social and cultural markers are mapped on to race (De la Cadena 2001). Among the
most important markers is money and the possession of resources, a marker strongly
associated with whiteness and western culture. Therefore, in this racialised social
hierarchy elements and characteristics associated with whiteness and western
culture are seen as superior, and those associated with indigenous Andean culture
are seen as inferior. This interconnection between race and class yields a social
stratification that is fluid but still very hierarchical.
Racialised social hierarchies and the dynamics of marginalisation associated
with them are not only present in the Peruvian society at large, but can also be
observed in Andean communities which also tend to be stratified. In these, some
individuals and families hold more economic and/or political power relative to oth-
ers and have more access to resources. Within this hierarchy, because of how race,
class, and gender intertwine, Andean women are usually positioned at the lowest
level. They tend to have a subordinate role to men, who are considered as the head
of the household, and make the important decisions at the family and community
levels (Radcliffe et al. 2003). In some Andean communities, men also exercise great
economic control by having more rights to land and other material resources (León
2011). Because Andean men have been assigned more power in their own
communities, they also have more access to other circles of power beyond the
community, extending into urban areas. With this greater access to urban areas also
comes greater possibilities of access to education.
Education is usually associated with greater opportunities for social and economic
progress, and this is not an exception in Andean communities. Andean families believe
that by providing education for future generations they can put a stop to the marginali-
sation to which they have historically been subject (Ames 2002). Unfortunately, many
times the opportunity for Andean women to complete their basic education is limited.
Access to equal education in Peru has improved compared to previous decades (World
Bank 2007), during which women living in rural areas had very little, if any, formal
schooling. However, inequality in education persists despite there being no gender
gap in primary school attendance. Rather, the gender gap appears in secondary school
and increases as girls grow into adolescents (Montero 2006). Studies have docu-
mented how some Andean families stop sending their daughters to school because
they fear they will be sexually abused, and because they expect them to take on more
domestic chores (García 2003; Montero 2006). Other studies have shown how preg-
nancy continues to contribute to adolescent girls dropping out of school (World Bank
2007). As may be observed, Andean women face greater challenges to reach higher
levels of schooling which leaves them at a disadvantage compared to other groups in
Peruvian society. The challenges to complete their education as well as the racial and
patriarchal marginalisation present both in their communities, and in Peruvian society
at large, continue to inhibit many Andean women’s ability to escape poverty. Official
statistics from 2017 show that the highest levels of poverty and extreme poverty in the
country are found in rural areas of the Andes (INEI 2018). Moreover, due to the inter-
locking forms of structural violence explained above, poverty can be even more detri-
mental to the wellbeing of Andean women.
30 G. Távara
Andean women’s racial and gender marginalisation has also been evidenced in
the particular ways they have been affected by socio-historical processes, such as
the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980–2000). This conflict hit hardest the
central-southern regions of the Andes, disproportionately affecting Andean
communities (CVR 2003). Founded in June 2001, The Commission for Truth and
Reconciliation (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in Spanish) found that
three out of every four victims, among the almost 70 thousand victims, were
quechua-speaking campesinos [peasants in Spanish] (2003). Moreover, among
these victims the majority (80%) were young men between the ages of 20 and 49
(CVR 2003). In this scenario, many surviving Andean women had to find ways to
face the new challenges that emerged in the wake of the conflict as they struggled to
reconstruct their lives in conditions of dire poverty (Bueno-Hansen 2015). Several
women’s organisations emerged seeking to face these harsh material conditions.
Among the most well-known of these organisations was one in which women
organised under their identity as mothers, Club de Madres [Mothers’ Club in
Spanish]. These women advocated for the families who had survived the conflict so
that their material needs could be addressed (Bueno-Hansen 2015). Their work has
had a significant impact organising women in Mother’s Clubs at the district level
through many regions. By the time the conflict ended there were approximately
1800 Mother’s Clubs in the region of Ayacucho. In the wake of the conflict the
women from Mother’s Clubs became protagonists of an important social movement
who advocated for the guarantee of their families’ livelihood (Venturoli 2009).
Women in post-conflict contexts, and in impoverished contexts more broadly,
have been organising to improve their conditions of life in several parts of the world,
and many times becoming involved in development projects working in collabora-
tion with NGOs and state institutions. Most development projects have focused on
improving women’s economic development at the micro level through income-
generating projects in which women are trained in several skills (see Walsh 2000 in
Bosnia; Kalungu-Banda 2004 in Kosovo). Unfortunately, these projects have often
overlooked the structural issues, such as the patriarchal and racial dynamics present
in the context, the issues that have led to women’s marginalisation in the first place.
Also, oftentimes these projects are conceived by professionals in institutional con-
texts far away from the social realities in which they will be implemented. Therefore,
they lack a contextualised comprehension of women’s experiences vis-a-vis devel-
opment as well as about the challenges they find as they seek to achieve it.
In order to contribute to a feminist decolonial praxis it is important not only to
incorporate indigenous women’s understandings about development and in general,
about how they want to live, but to place them at the centre. In this way, professionals,
such as community psychologists, can contribute to challenging the hegemonic
discourses about development and wellbeing that are prevalent in psychology. This
feminist PAR project sought to contribute to this line of work by foregrounding
Andean women’s understandings about development and about how gender
dynamics operate in their local context and beyond, either constraining or fostering
women’s development.
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 31
company. This person played a key role by providing support with the logistics and
procedures required to formally register the association.1
Data Collection and Analysis: Processes of Collective Knowledge
Construction The research focus of the feminist PAR was to explore how a newly
founded women’s association could be a means to confront structural violence,
including racism, hetero-patriarchy and economic violence—all forces rooted in
colonial histories that continue to marginalise and contribute to Andean women’s
impoverishment. To this end, I facilitated several participatory workshops during
nine months, and these generated the core data for the research. In these workshops
we explored topics that the participants and I saw as related to the research focus
through the use of creative techniques. These techniques included both creative
arts—such as drawings, sculptures, and collages—and embodied practices, such as
role play and frozen images (Boal 2013). Both creative arts and embodied practices
have contributed importantly to feminist PAR processes with indigenous women
(see Lykes and Crosby 2015 in Guatemala).
For the most part of the workshops, creative techniques were used collectively in
groups of four or five participants. An iterative process of data analysis was carried
out in which participants used these techniques, such as collective drawings, to
express their understandings regarding a particular topic. The product of these tech-
niques was then presented to all participants giving place to subsequent group dis-
cussions. The process was iterative given that I recorded both the products of these
techniques (e.g. drawings, colleges, dramatizations) and the discussions about them,
and then, after organising and synthesising this emergent information, I presented it
back to the participants in the next session for their further analysis. When the work-
shops ended, I analysed the transcribed discussions that took place in the workshops
through a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2014). I comple-
mented the analysis of the workshop transcriptions with data from individual inter-
views conducted with some of the workshop participants and with field notes.
Feminist PAR processes might seem to provide an unmediated representation of
participants voices. However, as researchers we also play an important role when
facilitating these processes given that we partly shape the knowledge that emerges
from participants when we interact with them in the workshops and also when we
organise and write-up the findings. Thus, rather than presenting these results as
purely the participants’ understandings or voices it is best to refer to the findings
that emerge from feminist PAR processes as dialogic co-constructions (Lykes et al.
2003). Also important is to critically and reflexively interrogate our own positionality
vis-a-vis the participants given that it can help us understand how it informed the
knowledge constructed through these processes (St. Louis and Barton 2002). I have
previously analysed and written about my privileged positionality as a mestiza
woman who is part of an upper-middle class in relation to the group of Andean
1
I previously reflected about the complex power dynamics present in the relationship between the
extractive industry company and this group of Andean women (see Távara 2018). However, it is
beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail these complexities.
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 33
women I collaborated with (see Távara 2018). I have also reflected about how the
power dynamics taking place in our relationship constrained the processes of
knowledge construction, and how we sought to counter these dynamics and promote
the protagonism of participants.
It is also important to underscore that this chapter presents locally constructed
knowledge that responds to the socio-cultural and historic particularities of this
Andean community. Thus, even when it might contribute to understanding social
processes related to the incorporation of western ideas in other similar Andean and
indigenous contexts, this research by no means seeks to portray a homogenised
version of Andean women’s experiences and organising processes. Furthermore,
even when at times this chapter tends to present Andean communities in clearly
delimited contexts and in opposition to what is external to them, it is important to
acknowledge that these boundaries are flexible, porous and increasingly unclear. It
is partly because of the porosity of these limits, that ideas forged elsewhere are
increasingly being incorporated, adapted, and transformed within Andean
communities. In the following section I present in more detail Andean women’s
engagement in some of such processes. I finalise this chapter by reflecting on some
of the learnings that can be drawn from this feminist PAR project for building a
feminist decolonial community psychology.
Knitting, a practice very tied to Andean women’s cultural identities, was also
encompassed within participants’ idea of development. These Andean women felt
that by coming together and knitting to earn an income, they could improve their
conditions of life, as illustrated in the following quote: “I’ve knitted like three or
four jumpers, with the purpose of selling them. I’m very motivated to improve (...)
Now that we are associated and knit a lot, we can move forward and progress for
our families’ wellbeing”. As can be seen, Andean women draw their ideas about
development and progress from their own cultural practices and knowledge(s);
these influence how they engage capitalist production, as evidenced by their
decisions to incorporate local traditions (e.g., knitting) into a market economy
(Radcliffe and Laurie 2006).
The participants’ perceptions about the community’s development also reflected
their desire to combine the “traditional” and modern world. They not only saw
development and progress as the construction of infrastructure or the creation of
businesses, but also as something that should include their campesino activities.
This suggests that Andean women see their culture as offering resources that can
contribute to progress and to a more modern way of life. In relation to this point, one
participant stated: “With the irrigation technology, we will be able to... wow! grow
crops in that big field. That will bring progress. [Development] is also cattle rearing,
cows for example. We produce a lot of cheese, we have the best cheese, we will be
able to do business with the roads”. This research illustrated that participants are
reluctant to leave their knowledge and practices behind. Rather, they have a desire
to generate income from this knowledge and these practices to enable them to
survive in the current economy (Ruiz Bravo 2005).
As can be seen, Andean women have much to contribute to notions about devel-
opment and about how to live a better life in the contemporary moment. However,
many times, due to the way ideas about development are defined and introduced
into Andean communities their voices are not incorporated, neither prioritised.
Rather, Andean women tend to be positioned in unfavourable ways vis-a-vis devel-
opment. Development is a definitional project—usually defined from a place of
power and privilege—that fixes an idea of the modern society that all should pursue.
The ideas and perspectives of groups identified as “developing” are not included in
this framework nor in its policies (Esteva 1985). Consequently, groups such as
Andean women are defined in relation to this idea of development and so are posi-
tioned as underdeveloped and not-modern. In our work with communities, as out-
side professionals, we might be unknowingly promoting this message as well by not
incorporating Andean women’s knowledge(s) and ideas, and by focusing on what
needs to change in them, the “underdeveloped” subjects. Therefore, we need to shift
our focus to what needs to change, not in Andean women, but in the social structures
that are marginalising them. In this challenge towards social transformation Andean
women have much to contribute.
Andean Women’s Racialised Experiences of Violence Against Women and
Their Resistance to It Violence against women is a social problem that has enor-
mously damaging effects on the lives of women all over the world. However, the
36 G. Távara
particular shape this violence takes and how it is experienced by women can vary
significantly depending on their position at the intersection of race, class, level of
education, among others. Seeking to incorporate a feminist decolonial lens, that
places the diverse experiences of marginalised women at the forefront, the feminist
PAR project referred to sought to analyse and highlight the particularities of Andean
women’s experiences regarding violence against women as well as their
understandings about how to resist it.
For the Andean women who participated in the research, violence against women—
particularly intimate partner violence—was an ever-present experience that perme-
ated several areas of their lives. They spoke about many forms of abuse that women
in the town experience at the hands of their husbands and expressed that although
forms of physical violence had decreased in the recent years, forms of psychological
abuse were still present. They indicated that some men treated their wives with dis-
dain, yelling at them and bossing them around. Men were described as domineering,
and their economic control was described as particularly harmful for Andean women.
About this control, one participant stated: “Sometimes unemployed women do not
have an income (...) So because of this women are underestimated. Their husbands
tell them ‘I have you, I feed you, I dress you’”. Participants explained how some men
do not allow their wives to work outside the home or to have their own income. Thus,
most (if not all) domestic chores, including child-rearing, fall onto women.
Participants described rearing of children as a particularly limiting activity, one
that leaves Andean women with no time to do anything other than caring for their
offspring. Women mentioned that children “cut off their hands”, expressing how
their hands no longer belong to them; they were just for their family and children.
Furthermore, experiences of motherhood and becoming pregnant were described by
the participants as something that interrupts life plans of many young townswomen.
They explained how many young girls become pregnant while they are still in high
school and most of them drop out. In the words of a participant: “So, when we are
studying, sometimes you end up getting pregnant. So men… well, we women are
screwed, right? You have to care for your child.” Their description suggests that they
perceived motherhood as being out of women’s control.
Andean women’s descriptions of being pushed towards domestic life and not
having control over their pregnancy and motherhood reveal how control over
women’s reproductive life contributes to their being controlled economically
(Radcliffe 2015). Moreover, this control is experienced at a corporeal level. Women
experience neither their hands or womb belonging to them. Through this symbolism
these Andean women conveyed a lack of control over both their own productive
labour (their hands) and their reproductive labour (womb); productive (income-
generating) labour is limited by reproduction. Therefore, because of patriarchal
ideologies enrooted in Andean communities, women’s self-fulfilment becomes
subordinated to the fate of their children or spouses (Velázquez 2007). In this
scenario, the importance women place on using their hands for knitting acquires
additional relevance: it is a way of reclaiming the use of their hands for a task they
have decided upon so as to improve their own future and that of their families. In
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 37
this way women take control over their productive labour in the service of the
children they have produced, but on their own terms (Távara 2018).
In order to further understand Andean women’s experiences of violence it is
important to situate their experiences of gender marginalisation in relation to the
racial and class dynamics present in their context. Participants described several
cases of discrimination against Andean women who were perceived as poorer and
as having less education. These women are treated in patronizing ways, as ignorant
by others in the town and from outside and are not taken seriously. Women related
that they were sometimes called “polleronas”, in relation to the name of the
traditional Andean woman’s skirt called “pollera”. In relation to this humiliation a
participant said: “For example, when professionals see a pollerona they don’t even
answer you well. Or if your child is studying and you go to the school, they’ll answer
you ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ and they send you back.”
The mock and therefore reinscription of the pollera on Andean women’s bodies,
can be understood not only as a devaluation of their Andean culture, but also of their
Andean womanhood. In a way, this reveals the control of Andean women’s subjectiv-
ity and representation through discourse (Távara 2018). Decolonial feminists have
asserted that women from the global south are placed in an essentialised position of
subalternity (Mohanty 1991). This phenomenon can also be observed in the Peruvian
national imagery wherein a woman in a “pollera” with braided hair appears as the
most emblematic symbol of a rich cultural legacy on the one hand, and as the last
remains of a backward culture on the other (Babb 2017). Thus, the choice of the word
“pollera” in this case, evidences an expression of racialised gendered violence
against Andean women, a form of violence against women that goes beyond the
normative western-informed understandings of this social problem.
As can be seen, the distinctive shape violence against Andean women takes, and
how they experience it, is strongly informed by the racial and class dynamics present
in their context. Similarly, the way Andean women seek to resist this violence is also
influenced by contextual factors as well as by the particularities of their ethnic and
gender identities. Thus, Andean women’s understandings of resistance to violence
against women might significantly differ from the ways western-informed feminist
have envisioned these struggles.
In the feminist PAR project participants showed an apparent ambivalence towards
ideas and actions related to gender inequalities, particularly in relation to gender
roles. They emphasised that women can do the same things as men. In relation to
this a woman stated: “Now women and men are equal, women can produce and men
can produce as well”. They expressed that women needed to get out of their homes
to organise and work. However, at the same time they expressed that it is women’s
responsibility to take care of domestic tasks and that it is in their nature to care for
children because, as a participant mentioned, “women are the cornerstone of the
home”. Similarly, even when most participants valued talks and workshops about
gender equality given by outside professionals, some of them strongly opposed state
institutions and services that protect and promote women’s rights because they felt
that they were threatening marriages and families. These ambivalent reactions might
38 G. Távara
give the impression that Andean women’s gender identities are still strongly
informed by patriarchal ideas. However, this ambivalence might also be revealing
that for some Andean women their roles as caregivers and mothers within families
and communities are foundational. Possibly because of this Andean women’s
associations have tended to organise around what would be considered traditional
roles, such as motherhood, or in the case of the participants from this feminist PAR,
as knitters (Boesten 2010).
Sometimes ideas about womanhood put forward by professionals influenced by
western feminist thinking, are not aligned with Andean women’s ideas about their
gender and ethnic identities, identities they are constantly constructing and
negotiating vis-a-vis their social setting. This is not to say that some of the ideas
regarding womanhood that Andean women hold do not lead them to engage in
oppressive dynamics, but rather to question the extent to which gender identities
and roles that at the first glance might seem restraining for those of us trained in
western feminist thought, might be source of pride and strength for Andean women.
Furthermore, organising under the role of motherhood or knitters might give the
impression that women are taking a conservative approach that remains within the
permissible margins of power. However, in these groups, women could gain more
empowerment and gender awareness, which might be more responsive to their
actual experiences and afterwards contribute to unforeseeable shifts that undermine
existing patriarchal relationships (Boesten 2010).
Gender emancipation is a culturally grounded process and as such women will
traverse different paths, and the process will look different depending on the socio-
cultural setting in which they work and live. In Peru, Andean women’s identities
develop not only in relation to their own local histories, but also because of
continuous confrontation with dominant models of femininity and masculinity
brought from Lima, and by other people who enter their communities from further
afield. Andean women choose to identify with some of these external ideas and
appropriate them in their own ways to their local contexts, but they also choose to
reject others (Ruiz Bravo 2005).
Through this chapter I have discussed how a feminist PAR project allowed a group
of Andean women and me to analyse how they were engaging and responding to
ideas (about organising-as-women, development, and violence against women)
strongly influenced from outside the community. In this way, I have sought to
illustrate how working in feminist PAR process with indigenous women can
contribute to a decolonial feminist community psychology, specifically in relation
to ideas around ‘development’ and gender.
Feminist PAR can facilitate spaces through which indigenous women’s knowl-
edges and understandings about their own experiences of gendered and racialised
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 39
References
Ames, P. (2002). Para ser iguales, para ser distintos: Educación, escritura y poder en el Perú [To
be similar and to be different: Education, writing and power in Peru]. Lima, Peru: IEP.
Babb, F. E. (2017). Desigualdades entrelazadas: Repensando la raza, el género y las identidades
indígenas en el Perú andino [Intertwined inequality: Rethinking race, gender and indigenous
identities in Andean Peru]. In V. Zavala & M. Back (Eds.), Racismo y lenguaje (pp. 229–268).
Lima: Peru: Fondo Editorial PUCP.
Boal, A. (2013). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. New York:
Routledge.
Boesten, J. (2010). Intersecting inequalities: Women and social policy in Peru, 1990–2000.
University Park: Penn State University Press.
Bueno-Hansen, P. (2015). Feminist and human rights struggles in Peru. Decolonizing transitional
justice. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
CVR, Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación - Perú [Truth and Reconciliation Commission
-Peru]. (2003). Informe final [Final Report]. Lima, Peru: CVR.
De la Cadena, M. (2001). Reconstructing race: Racism, culture and mestizaje in Latin America.
NACLA Report on the Americas, 34(6), 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2001.11722
585.
Esteva, G. (1985). Development: Metaphor, myth, threat. Development: Seeds of Change, 3, 78–79.
Fals Borda, O. (2001). Participatory (action) research in social theory: Origins and challenges.
In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and
practice (pp. 27–37). London: Sage.
Ferree, M. M., & Tripp, A. M. (Eds.). (2006). Global feminism: Transnational women’s activism,
organizing, and human rights. New York: NYU Press.
García, M. E. (2003). The politics of community. Education, indigenous rights, and ethnic mobi-
lization in Peru. Latin American Perspectives, 30(1), 70–95. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.
org/stable/3184966.
Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática – INEI. (2018). Resultados de la pobreza mon-
etaria 2017. Informe técnico [Monetary poverty results 2017. Technical report]. Retrieved
from https://www.inei.gob.pe/media/cifras_de_pobreza/presentacion_evolucion-de-pobreza-
monetaria-2017.pdf
Kalungu-Banda, A. (2004). Post-conflict programs for women: Lessons from the Kosovo women’s
initiative. Gender and Development, 12(3), 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/135520704123313
32290.
León, M. (2011). La desigualdad de género en la propiedad de la tierra en América Latina [Gender
inequality and land property in Latin America]. In C. Verschuur (Ed.), Du grain à moudre:
Genre, Développement Rural et Alimentation (pp. 189–207). Geneva: Graduate Institute
Publications.
Lugones, M. (2008). Coloniality and gender. Tabula Rasa, (9), 73–102. Retrieved from http://ref.
scielo.org/4dtqf8.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypathia, 25(4), 742–759. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x.
Lykes, M. B., & Crosby, A. (2015). Creative methodologies as a resource for Mayan women’s
protagonism. In B. Hamber & E. Gallagher (Eds.), Psychosocial perspectives on peacebuilding
(Peace psychology book series) (pp. 147–186). Cham: Springer.
Lykes, M. B., Terre Blanche, M., & Hamber, B. (2003). Narrating survival and change in
Guatemala and South Africa: The politics of representation and a liberatory community psy-
chology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1/2), 79–90.
Maguire, P. (1987). Doing participatory research: A feminist approach. Amherst: Center for
International Education.
Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory… 41
Mohanty, C. (1988). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist
Review, (30), 61–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395054.
Mohanty, C. (1991). Introduction. Cartographies of struggle. Third world women and the politics
of feminism. In C. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L. Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics
of feminism (pp. 1–50). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Montero, C. (2006). La exclusión educativa de las niñas del campo: ¿pasado o presente? [The edu-
cational exclusion of girls in the countryside: past or present?]. In P. Ames (Ed.). Las brechas
invisibles. Desafíos para una equidad de género en la educación (pp. 203–232). Lima, Peru:
IEP and Universidad Cayetano Heredia.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from
South, 1(3), 533–580. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906/summary.
Radcliffe, S. (2015). Dilemmas of difference: Indigenous women and the limits of postcolonial
development policy. Durham: Duke University Press.
Radcliffe, S., & Laurie, N. (2006). Indigenous groups, culturally appropriate development, and
socio-spatial fix of Andean development. In S. Radcliffe (Ed.), Culture and development in a
globalizing world (pp. 83–106). London: Routledge.
Radcliffe, S. A., Laurie, N., & Andolina, R. (2003). The transnationalization of gender and reimag-
ining Andean indigenous development. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29(2),
387–416. https://doi.org/10.1086/378108.
Ruiz Bravo, P. (2005). El desarrollo visto desde las mujeres campesinas: Discursos y resistencias
[Development seen from campesina women: Discourses and resistances]. In D. Mato (Ed.),
Políticas de economía, ambiente y sociedad en tiempos de globalización (pp. 71–88). Caracas:
Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies. Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed
Books.
St. Louis, K., & Barton, A. C. (2002). Tales from the science education crypt: A critical reflection
of positionality. Subjectivity, and reflexivity in research. Forum: Qualitative Social Research,
3(3), 19. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-3.3.832.
Távara, G. (2018). Reclaiming our hands: Feminist participatory action research with Andean
women of Peru (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108124
Thorp, R., & Paredes, M. (2011). La etnicidad y la persistencia de la desigualdad. El caso Peruano
[Ethnicity and the persistence of inequality. The Peruvian Case]. Lima, Peru: IEP.
Velázquez, T. (2007). Reconociendo y reconstruyendo subjetividades. El encuentro con Manta
[Acknowledging and reconstructing subjectivities. The encounter with Manta]. En M. Barrig
(Ed.), Fronteras interiores: Identidad, diferencia y protagonismo de las mujeres (pp. 121–140).
Lima, Peru: IEP.
Venturoli, S. (2009). Huir de la violencia y construir. Mujeres y desplazamientos por violencia
política en Perú. Deportate, Esulo, Profughe, 11, 46–63. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.
net/2318/1508193
Walsh, M. (2000). Aftermath: The impact of conflict on women in Bosnia and Herzegovina
(Report No 302). Washington, DC: Center for Development Information and Evaluation:
USAID. Retrieved from http://www.peacewomen.org/assets/file/Resources/Academic/wps_
aftermaththeimpactofconflictonwomeninbandh_cdie_2000.pdf
World Bank. (2007). Toward high-quality education in Peru: Standards, accountability, and capac-
ity building. In World Bank country study. Washington, DC: World Bank. Retrieved from
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/6745.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial
Feminist Method? Contextualising
Intimate Partner Violence in South Africa
Contents
he Geopolitics of Pro-Feminist Studies on Mxn, Masculinities and IPV
T 45
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method in Community Psychology 46
The Study: Sampling, Data Collection and Analysis 47
Precarious Positions and the Lives of Black Mxn: Readings at the Intersection
of ‘Race’, Class and Gender 48
Implications and Final Considerations 54
References 56
I think my story needs to be heard – it is something that I kept almost all my life to myself.
I was raised in a happy family; my mother and my father were always there, but things
turned out differently after they got divorced. He started drinking a lot and hitting my
mother so stuff did change a lot for us – for me, my sister and my brother. (Scott)
A key problem area we engage with in this chapter involves the question of how
to humanise research participants (cf. Paris and Winn 2014) whose lives have been
fundamentally shaped by the epistemic and material violences of colonialism, slav-
ery and apartheid but who have simultaneously benefitted from patriarchal domina-
tion and have perpetrated violence against womxn1 partners during the course of
their lives. We work with an understanding of colonial patriarchy that recognises the
long shadow that colonialism casts and how it continues to shape the lives and expe-
riences of the formerly colonised and their descendants, through structural violence
and ongoing political, social and economic exclusions and marginalisations (Irwin
and Umemoto 2016). In building on a body of work that takes an intersectional
1
We use the terms ‘womxn’ and ‘mxn’ to unsettle the essentialisation of normative notions of
gender and sex. Through these terms, we aim to centre the experiences of black womxn and mxn
located in the global South, as well as those who identify as transgender, intersex, queer and all
womxn and mxn who have found themselves erased from dominant norms of femininity and
masculinity
T. van Niekerk (*) · F. Boonzaier
Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa, Department of Psychology,
University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
perspective on mxn’s lives, especially mxn located in the global South, and that
acknowledges the ways in which colonialism involved the assertion of not only rac-
ist domination but also heterosexist and gendered domination (Boonzaier and van
Niekerk 2018; Moolman 2013; Ratele 2013a; Salo 2007) we talk about the violence
mxn perpetrate against the womxn in their lives and about their own precarities as
mxn located within a colonial hypercapitalist patriarchal context.
In our previous work involving interviews with mxn in domestic violence inter-
vention programmes, we find that mxn bring the contexts of their lives, experiences
and histories into view through talking about their participation in the programmes
(Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018). Mxn’s understandings of themselves, their vio-
lence and their potential for changing consciousness around violence against womxn
appear to be shaped by their intersecting identifications with race, class, gender,
history and location. We have found that the complex entanglement of their family
histories, community norms and social and cultural norms of violence and gender
and how this shaped their processes of ‘transformation’ are centred in their narra-
tives (van Niekerk and Boonzaier 2016). In this chapter we work with the life his-
tory approach to foreground the realities of black mxn’s lives within a racist
patriarchal context, such as South Africa, to illustrate how it brings to view the
complex intricacies of privilege and disadvantage that shape their lives. We explore
the potential of the life history methodology to exemplify the principles of a deco-
lonial feminist community psychology through mxn’s narratives of intimate partner
violence (IPV) against womxn. We reflect on the application of this approach with
two black mxn participants – Michael (age 46) and Scott (age 33) – recruited, in
Cape Town, South Africa from a programme intended to end mxn’s violence against
intimate partners. Importantly, we explore the utility of the life history approach for
working with marginalised mxn given that research has predominantly explained
the high levels of violence against womxn in South Africa as a symptom of particu-
lar identities and statuses of mxn (i.e. black, poor, low education). In a country so
fundamentally marked by racialised inequality, any reading about violence that
links it to poverty, low education and unemployment, will uncritically mark black
mxn as inherently violent, isolating their very racialised and classed identities as
‘risk factors’ for violence (Boonzaier 2018). In the South African context, impor-
tantly, it is the entanglement of black mxn’s histories of racial oppressions and their
complicity within hetero-patriarchy that require attention through methodologies,
such as, the life history.
In this chapter, we present mxn’s narrations of their violence within the broader
contexts of their histories and lives, and have placed a focus on the emancipatory
and transformative potential of the life history approach and the benefit it might
hold for understanding this larger context of marginalised mxn’s histories and their
lives. We conclude by providing commentary on the potential opportunities offered
through a life history approach and what that might mean for a decolonial feminist
community psychology as well as its capacity for challenging normalised ways of
doing and for consciousness-raising.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 45
It has been suggested in work by Shefer et al. (2015) as well as our recent work
(Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018) that global understandings of mxn’s violence
against womxn have been dominated by western and radical feminist discourse. In
broad terms, westernised forms of radical feminism position all mxn as equal ben-
eficiaries of the patriarchal gender order, casting all womxn as equally oppressed
(Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018). These patterns similarly carry through into
criminal justice work and intervention programmes in South Africa designed for
violent mxn which tend to take a reductionist approach to ‘treating’ mxn through
their identities as ‘perpetrators’ while the complexities of their lives are not fore-
grounded. For example, we illustrate how this one-dimensional focus on mxn – who
racially identify as black – fails to acknowledge how they may have been victims of
other forms of violence, such as structural violences and histories of family violence
(see Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018). Research in South Africa also suggests that
black mxn who are marginalised in terms of their race and class experience mascu-
linity in a particular way as a result of structural and racial oppressions, ways that
western mainstream feminist theories fail to capture (Ratele 2013b). These prob-
lematics around the hegemonic production of knowledge from the West speak to the
one-directional flow of knowledge that tends to globalise and normalise Euro-
American knowledges, “silencing their positionality and location” (Kessi and
Boonzaier 2018, p. 304).
Although western feminist perspectives have been central to shaping gender jus-
tice discourse globally, these have also been critiqued – for example through black
feminist theorising (e.g., Crenshaw 1994, Mohanty 1988) that argues that there is a
limited focus on gender or patriarchy, and that western feminist discourses fail to
acknowledge how multiple identities, such as race, social class, sexuality, amongst
others, intersect (Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018). It is important to interrogate
mxn’s violence against partners in the context of gendered power relations, but it is
also crucial that attention be paid to how this violence is shaped by intricate systems
of domination and histories of ongoing oppression unique to the location under
investigation – issues which are central to intersectional feminist as well as decolo-
nial feminist perspectives (Kessi and Boonzaier 2018). The lens of decolonial femi-
nism is useful for the recognition of continuities in the decimation, destruction and
dispossession wrought by colonialism and for challenging the ways it manifests in
the present through knowledge production, representation, and everyday life in
global southern contexts. In avoiding the “‘danger’ of reproducing Northern author-
ity” (Shefer et al. 2015, p. 169), we turn our attention to the variety of feminist theo-
risations (e.g., Gqola 2007; Ratele 2013b, 2018) developed in South Africa and on
the continent, where we see how the complexities of mxn and womxn’s lives in the
global South are attended to. It is through this work that complex questions of
power, violence and difference can be contextualised and engaged with. Central to
46 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
Together with scholars such as Kessi and Boonzaier (2018), we imagine a central
aspect of the decolonial feminist project for community psychology to engage with
the complexities of historical traumas in relation to South Africa’s past of colonial-
ism, slavery and apartheid, and how these traumas manifest in the present to
shape those previously subjugated. In order to fully grapple with the persistence and
high levels of mxn’s violence in the context of intimate heterosexual relationships,
a focus on transgenerational traumas and the epistemic violences enacted on people
is required (ibid.). These relationships can be interrogated through life history meth-
odologies on the lives of black mxn who are descendants of historical oppressions,
and who currently find themselves positioned as perpetrators of IPV.
Scholars, such as, Sonn et al. (2013) have noted the potential of storytelling
methodologies to encompass a decolonial agenda and to disrupt power relations,
particularly in the fields of community and liberation psychology. However, as
noted in the introduction to this volume, although there may be a strong commit-
ment amongst some forms of decolonial community psychology to achieve libera-
tion and conscientisation, methodologies that exemplify these visions for social
transformation – along the axes of gender and race – are less visible (Montero
2009). This has particularly been the case for mainstream forms of community psy-
chology taken up in the South African context where, in spite of its intended align-
ment with principles of critical psychology, it has tended to depart from its liberatory
and critical aims (Seedat et al. 2004). In this chapter we argue that the life history
approach offers an opportunity and the potential to take up principles of a decolo-
nial feminist community psychology that aims to interrogate complex systems of
power and histories through the lens of gender, race, class and location. Through its
holistic approach, this methodology places a focus on personal narratives within
their wider socio-cultural, historical and material contexts, and places emphasis on
the social dynamics of power, oppression and resistance relayed in these narratives
(Atkinson 2012). The act of telling a life story additionally provides the tools for
those who have been historically oppressed to offer personal narratives that work to
bring ‘everyday’ forms of racial and structural oppressions to the surface, as illus-
trated through Chaudhry’s (2016) study that employs an intersectional life history
methodology to gain insights into the structural violences encountered in the lives
and histories of Pakistani Christians. In this way, storytelling might be conceived of
as a socially transformative praxis in its potential to disrupt power relations and
‘unsilence’ those historically and currently subjugated (Chaudhry 2016; Sonn et al.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 47
2013). We ask how life histories might elicit transformative praxes, in this chapter,
specifically amongst mxn who are in the process of ending their violence against
womxn, and who may continue to be marginalised through their racial and class
identities but in powerful positions relative to their subjectivities as heterosexual
mxn. We additionally show how stories of historical traumas and structural vio-
lences emerge through mxn’s life history narratives (see Chaudhry 2016), allowing
those who have been silenced to represent their lives and experiences on their own
terms, which aligns with ideas around decolonising the research endeavour.
It is in the context of Michael and Scott’s life histories that we argue for the
potential of a life history approach to espouse the principles of a decolonial feminist
community psychology, especially in its potential to exemplify transformative
praxes, to make historical traumas and violences visible, and to conscientise mxn
who aim to end their violence. The mxn provide a wide angle reading of their lives
and histories, bringing them (and us) to the current moment in which they are posi-
tioned as perpetrator in an intimate partner violence intervention programme.
The life history data we use in this chapter emerges from a larger, ongoing study
which aims to examine the social and collective features of IPV amongst a range of
actors, including partner violent mxn. In addition to being positioned as a study of
community norms of gendered violence, this larger study explores how these
resources allow individuals to construct meanings around such violence and
employs critical qualitative methods and feminist methodologies in the interest of
privileging participants’ voices.
Here, we draw on life history interviews conducted with two mxn who had been
participants in a programme2 for perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Life his-
tory interviews were conducted over two interview sessions. The first interview
focused on their lives from childhood to adulthood in a relatively unstructured man-
ner, inviting them to free associate and speak generally about their past and current
lives. The second interview focused more firmly on their perpetration of violence
against their partner and the specific incident of abuse that resulted in them having
been mandated into the programme. As the questions were broadly framed, the mxn
had the opportunity to speak about their intimate relationships and perpetration of
violence in both interviews, if the moment presented itself. Consistent with narra-
tive approaches to interviewing, we follow the meaning frames of participants as
they lead us through their stories. The two interview sessions were scheduled
three weeks apart to allow participants time for reflection, but also enough time to
reflect on the teachings from their participation in the programme sessions.
2
The programme adopts a psycho-educational, Duluth-CBT-type intervention model and takes
place over a period of 20 sessions. Both voluntary and largely court-mandated mxn received edu-
cation about domestic violence through this programme.
48 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
Aligned with the life history method’s positioning within the field of narrative
studies (Atkinson 2012), we employed a thematic narrative analysis. We were
guided by Riessman’s (2008) outline of the method with a focus on ‘what’ is said
by participants, rather than ‘how’ narratives are relayed, while also placing empha-
sis on language, power, subjectivity and the co-construction of meaning. We addi-
tionally acknowledge that our own reading of the data represents one of many
interpretations and is shaped by our own histories, identity markers and institutional
affiliations. As black cisgender womxn conducting and engaging with the interview
data, we were able to identify with the mxn based on our shared racial identities and
upbringings in various Cape Town communities but also through our working-class
backgrounds. In decolonising the way we ‘do’ research, we prioritise mxn’s life
histories by attempting to keep them intact – as far as that is possible in an academic
paper – to ensure that their voices are privileged above ours. Doing so was impor-
tant especially as the academy continues the epistemic violences of colonisation in
the ways in which it retells and packages the stories of the colonised and their
descendants (Tuck and Wayne Yang 2014). We present each of the mxn’s life stories
separately, extracting significant themes that relate to their intersecting identities.
We attempt to understand the complexities behind mxn’s narrations about his-
torical traumas of violence, oppressions and the normalisation of violence experi-
enced in their lives, and the functions these narratives may serve. For example, in
spaces such as the interview and the intervention programme, these narratives may
function to justify their perpetration of partner violence. However, our intention for
this chapter is to move beyond the study of how mxn’s accounts of their violence
minimise and justify their acts towards situating these narratives within the broader
historical and social contexts of their lives. As noted here, and in previous work by
Boonzaier and van Niekerk (2018), mxn’s reflections on their perpetration of vio-
lence cannot be imagined outside the historical conditions that fostered various
oppressions and structural violences, and the normalisation of violence that often-
times represent a form of ‘protection’ and conflict resolution in mxn’s homes, fami-
lies and communities. The life history methodology allowed for a perspective on the
complexities behind mxn’s perpetration of violence in the context of their home
environments, histories and social and cultural contexts.
Michael is a 47-year-old mxn, living in an area on the northern outskirts of the Cape
Town metropole, and married with a daughter of 19 years of age. He holds a bach-
elor’s degree in computer science and is employed in a full-time capacity. As the
eldest of three siblings, he grew up in Soweto, Johannesburg in a household run by
his mother. He describes his father as absent, having left when he was a young boy.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 49
Although he explains that he is unable to remember much about his parents and
their relationship during this time, there appears to be some recollection of their
frequent arguments and fights. Michael’s childhood was shaped by the responsibili-
ties he was expected to carry out as the eldest son in a household with no father.
Michael: As a child, look I mean being the eldest and I have three siblings, I felt responsi-
ble for them most of the time, I mean I could…I could understand that my parents were
having issues and at the same time, I had these three innocent people that looked up to me
and wanted to play with me. That is all they wanted, just wanted to play with me […] it did
not affect me, it is just that it made me more responsible, I think, early on in life, before
most people were responsible. So, I already had that knowledge of looking after kids, mak-
ing sure that they have eaten, making sure that when my mother comes back from work,
everything is sorted, I need to go pick them up from crèche. You know, sometimes I would
walk with my brother to school when he started school, we were in the same school, and my
sister at the same time, so for me it was just taking care of business, that is all it was, nothing
else.
Taryn: You were an adult figure in the eyes of your siblings …
Michael: That is all I was basically, I was like my mother’s husband in a sense – I mean that
is pretty much how I looked at myself. I mean, my father was not there so I thought, you
know what, I am the mxn, so pretty much that is how it was.
Michael narrates about his younger years as a time where he was propelled into the
responsibilities of an adult to ensure the care of his younger siblings and to provide
the necessary support to his mother as the single-parent and breadwinner. The
responsibility and parenting identity taken on by Michael is what some psycholo-
gists have called ‘parentification’ or the ‘parentified child’ (see Jurkovic 1997),
identified by the blurring of boundaries of the parent-child relationship, with the
potential in some cases to impact negatively on the child’s self-esteem and to com-
promise their sense of security. Rather than positioning himself as ill-equipped to
take on the parentified role, Michael describes this transition from boy-to-mxn as a
necessity and in terms of ‘responsibility’ and ‘business’ (i.e., “it is just that it made
me more responsible, I think, early on in life, before most people were responsible”
and “so for me it was just taking care of business”). He adds that “I was like my
mother’s husband in a sense”, having taken on the position of responsibility and
paternal care. Although Michael’s narrative of responsibility and duty could be read
through the lens of ‘parentification’ as a sign of his maturity at a young age, it could
also be read within the context of structural violences enacted on black families and
communities. Michael’s story about transitioning from the position of ‘child’ to
‘adult’ at an early age in apartheid South Africa is part of a larger narrative that
characterises the experiences of black working-class people forced to the margins,
living lives imposed on them by various structural violences, and forging ways to
survive these daily violences. These include scarce employment, poverty, a lack of
social support and challenges around providing for families – issues that pervade
the lives of those who continue to be marginalised in contemporary South Africa. As
Bell (2016) so eloquently put: “[a focus on structural violence] holds the potential
of broadening our definition of injury, widening the aperture through which we can
examine the effects of colonially produced trauma on individual and community
life” (p. 116).
50 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
Michael’s childhood was additionally shaped by the political and social climate
of the time. He vividly described everyday experiences of living through the Soweto
Uprising in the 1970s, which is regarded as an important turning point in South
African history and which brought about a series of protests through the country’s
transition from apartheid rule to a democratic one.
We lived in pretty much a military zone, I mean there were times when the army was just all
around us, all the time and you get out and you go to school, “oh there is the army”, it is like
you know, it was just regular so that is what people do not realise, that we…Soweto, or rather
most of Johannesburg, in those troubled places, was actually a military area. The presence of
the army was there the whole time […] There is always the presence of the military or some
type of force, that is what it was like, you get up, you get out of the house, the army is there,
patrolling […] they are checking everything, that was normal, you know, that was. Now you
realise, if you think about that, I mean that went on for more than 10 years […] Imagine the
type of violent minds that came out of that. You see that is why our country is where we are
right now in terms of the level of violence, that is pretty much it. I mean, gangsters were…
were grown out of a situation like that, I mean as kids we knew how to cock a gun, a rifle, we
knew exactly what type of rifle he was carrying, you know what I am saying? We were like
12, we already knew all of that, the Kasper [military vehicle], we knew Nyala [military
vehicle], we knew a Apache helicopter, whatever it was […] Most white conscripts would be
placed in Soweto as part of their military training, and a lot of the people we work with now
can tell you that they were placed in Soweto and this is how they learned leadership skills.
And I am thinking: “but hang on a second, I learned survival skills in the same place”.
The picture that Michael attempts to paint in narrating his story above is of the pre-
carity of growing up, as a black boy, in a context of racialised military repression
and violence – a context that so fundamentally shaped every aspect of his existence.
Drawing on narratives of violence, survival and various forms of oppression, he
speaks about growing up in this historical context where there was much violence
and oppressive policing of black people. Rather than feeling protected by the police,
black people in an apartheid state were mistrusting and fearful of the police. At the
same time, Michael provides a commentary on different types of masculinity and
racialised interpretations of violence. As Tengan (2002, cited in Irwin and Umemoto
2016) argues, racially privileged mxn are quick to point to the violence and hyper-
masculine practices of mxn on the racialised and classed margins in order for them
to position themselves as superior. What Michael is pointing to here are the ways in
which mxn like himself had to learn to survive in that context (fostering perhaps a
particular kind of masculinity) while the white mxn’s violence gave them a skill that
was described as something more respectable: “leadership skills”. Michael’s narra-
tive here hints at how violence is racialised and interpreted differently depending on
whether one is black or white.
Narrative continuities that foreground his racial identity emerged from his child-
hood stories of living in Soweto to his experiences of attending a predominantly
white South African university for his tertiary education.
It was not the best of places, I mean it was still white back then, I mean you struggled as a
black person. That was the bottom line, you just struggled. And, not because people are
racist, because things had just changed so quickly for all of us. I mean Mandela had just
been released, and suddenly we were forced to now be together and not a lot of people
understood and traditionally Rhodes University was a white university. That is the bottom
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 51
line and at that time it was still white, so I …you know, you struggle…we struggled a lot to
just get by and that…that also makes you grow up quickly, so yes, it was a difficult time.
It was in the context of the historically white university that Michael speaks about
the experience of feeling his racial identity and blackness marked, in a similar way
in which black South African students continue to feel today (Kessi and Cornell
2015). Michael makes it clear that he wanted to get as far away as possible from the
violent and oppressive militarised area he grew up in, when he says earlier in his
interview: “so that is why the first thing I wanted to do when I got out of Soweto is
some place free, some place where there is no sign of you know military, whatever,
just some place where it is quiet”. While trying to escape one form of oppression,
he found himself trapped in another, being forced to live in a space for white people,
as he expresses above, “suddenly we were forced to now be together”. Michael uses
the word “struggle” four times in the above extract, stressing the continued struc-
tural oppressions, and the daily battles and challenges he experienced as a black
working-class mxn attempting to obtain a higher education.
In Michael’s reflections on his current location – as a participant in the pro-
gramme for partner violent mxn – he notes his own perpetration of violence against
his partner as part of a larger idea around the normalisation of violence.
Michael: I’m actually quite positive and hopeful about this programme and I actually
intend to put it to good use. I’m actually thinking of even starting a blog to actually mention
this so that other people can realise that there are ways out there. I mean I grew up in an
environment where violence became an acceptable act and before you know it, it’s violence
all over the place, and this is where we are as a country; we are in this violent situation
where people are killing each other, striking each other, doing all sorts of things regularly.
But when you look at the cost of the, the source of the problem, it could have been handled
differently, and we don’t need to wait for, we don’t need [Organisation] after the act; it
should be something that happens even before people become violent.
From Michael’s life story above, it is clear that the meanings he makes of himself
currently, as a mxn who had perpetrated violence against his intimate partner, can-
not be divorced from the larger story of his life having been shaped by colonial and
apartheid patriarchy. In the South African context, importantly, and from Michael’s
story, it is the entanglement of black mxn’s histories of racial oppressions, structural
violences and their complicity within hetero-patriarchy that require attention.
Scott’s Story
We began this chapter with an extract from Scott’s life story and his narration of his
history. At the time of our interviews, Scott was 33 years-of-age living in a neigh-
bouring community to Michael’s. Having attained an engineering diploma, Scott is
employed in a part-time capacity to do manual labour on oil ships. He is married
with two young daughters, aged three and four years.
Scott narrated about the early stages of his childhood with fond memories of
receiving good care and love from his parents. However, things took a tragic turn in
his family, which Scott describes as being brought on by his father’s alcoholism and
52 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
physical abuse against his mother. The disintegration of Scott’s family played itself
out in the divorce and relocation of both his parents, leaving his older sister to be the
primary caregiver for Scott and his brother – in a similar way to which Michael had
to take care of his siblings.
Basically, we were on our own, my sister was still always taking caring of us. They divorced
and my father, he got married to another womxn, and my mother went overseas and got a
job as a nurse in London. So basically, she was there for 10 years, but she came to visit us
once, twice a year and my sister was taking care of us then. We did not have that structure
of mother and father. This all started when I was eight years old and we were depending on
our sister and she had to provide for us […] When my mother came back, she started drink-
ing a lot and that is when things went wrong. Most days, I did not sleep at home, I slept by
friends and that.
Scott’s childhood hardships appear to form part of a larger narrative about child-
headed households where, through financial need, parents or family members are
forced to migrate to cities and financial hubs to earn salaries for their families, leav-
ing children under the care of guardians or older siblings, as in the case of Scott’s
older sister. Beyond the rights of the affected children being compromised in child-
headed households, the responsible child would need to attend to domestic chores
and earn an income to cover food, clothes and other basics, meaning that oftentimes,
they would be unable to attend school, compromising their own educational devel-
opment to care for their siblings (Mogotlane et al. 2010). Scott’s mother returned
home when he was 16 years old. She continued to struggle with alcohol abuse which
made Scott seek refuge in other people’s homes.
I was sleeping by my friends and I saw violence all the time. They lived like in the ghetto.
They did not have what we had: cars, nice house, not a noisy neighbourhood and that kind
of stuff.
Scott narrates how his constant attempts to have a sense of belonging and place of
safety put him at further risk, in terms of placing him in violent contexts and being
exposed to normalised violence during his younger years, which resonates in some
ways with Michael’s early encounters. Central to his narrative was his attempt to
keep track of “where it went wrong” for his family. He frequently expressed anger
and disbelief at how his family – once described as financially stable, religious,
educated and ‘respectable’ – became a ‘broken’ family.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 53
I am angry but I think my whole situation goes around my father and my mother because
we were a happy family once and everything we asked for, we got. I do not know where it
went wrong because we were also on Sundays, as a family, in church. We got the best
school education – my sister is a social worker, my brother finished now – he is an accoun-
tant, I got to study fabrication engineering. There was no fighting in our house and drinking
and smoking because we knew that it is harmful to our bodies and stuff. My mother is a
nurse and she told us the effects that that stuff has on you, but then my father started drink-
ing […] I heard my father was dead, because of all the drinking. I was not even at his funeral
because my mother did not let us go to his funeral. So, I decided to live with my grand-
mother after that, she paid for my studies after school.
After the death of his grandmother with whom he had a close connection, Scott
explains that his addiction to alcohol began (“A few years back, four years ago, my
grandmother died, we were close. It is then that I start drinking”). Narratives around
the intergenerational transmission of trauma and family history of substance abuse as
a means of problem-solving were central to Scott’s life history. Similar to Scott’s
experience of having an absent father, he too considered himself an absent father
especially in the context of his employment which involved working on ships for
lengthy periods. Although this form of employment allows him to financially provide
for his family, it also supports a culture of drinking, making it even more challenging
for Scott to maintain his sobriety which he describes as a constant challenge.
It’s only when I go back to sea that it is difficult, because for that four, five, six months we
are on standby that’s when they drink a lot on the ships […] You can get everything for free
on that ship […] everyone on that ship is drinking […] I don’t want to test myself and be on
that ship and be around all guys who are drinking because I know I’m going to fail by test-
ing myself. That’s why I asked one of my bosses last night whether he can transfer me onto
that one Meridian ship because most of the guys don’t drink because there are older mxn on
that ship. Basically, the guys on that ship that I am currently on are 20, 26, 30, and most of
the guys are single.
Scott believes that his alcohol addiction, violence perpetration and employment that
keeps him from his family for months impacted negatively on his family, especially
on his eldest daughter, who he paraphrases as saying, “daddy is never at home, he is
always with friends, friends, friends and when he goes to work, we only see him
after a long time”. Scott’s life story followed a cyclical pattern in how narratives of
alcoholism, violence, and broken families recurrently featured, in childhood and the
contemporary. He expressed much internal conflict with having witnessed his
father’s abuse against his mother and having started abusing his wife too, while also
reflecting on his eldest daughter who is now similarly exposed to Scott’s abuse
towards his wife.
Sometimes I cry at night because why, my father he did it to my mother and it does not give
me excuse to do it to my own partner, I must know better because I am educated and I know
what is right from wrong.
Only thing is now, playing with my kids, spending time with them, try to convince them
to see me in another way because they see me now as that monster that was hitting their
mother and the older one is the clever one. She sits in front of me, and she will look at me
like I am a monster. I know she is a stress freak because every time anyone speaks, or
screams in the house, then she starts crying and that psychiatrist, she blames me for all that
stuff and I know I am to blame for it. […] That older one always comes bragging at home,
54 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
that this one child in her classroom always talks about her dad as her hero and all this. What
has she got to say in the classroom? Her dad is a womxn beater and I do not feel like living
like that anymore. I want to make changes in my life.
As noted by Ratele (2018) “a great feat of economically, racially and sexually violent
structures is precisely in predisposing its victims to hurt each other. Ironically, the
violence of the (formerly) oppressed against each other may sometimes follow the
same lines as the violence of the (former) oppressor: the formerly colonised become
neo-colonialists, those who were abused become abusers” (p. 96). There are a number
of recurring narratives to highlight in Scott’s life story; that of the oppressed becoming
the oppressor, the abused becoming the abuser. More so, themes of the intergenera-
tional abuse of alcohol and violence as well as his ideas around respectability were
central to his story. Scott’s disbelief about how his family life took a tragic and unfor-
tunate turn may relate to his understandings around ‘class’ and the broader ideology
of respectability. In describing his home environment as a space unlikely to cultivate
violence and alcohol abuse, he says above and in an earlier extract that his family
practiced good values, built a financially stable home, and experienced the privileges
of advancing him and his siblings’ education beyond high school. In contrast, he nar-
rates about violence and other high-risk behaviours as more likely to occur in his
friends’ communities, which he calls the “ghetto”. In South Africa we see the repro-
duction of stigmatising discourses that represent working-class black masculinities as
embodying the “streetwise gangster”, as violent, criminal and as dangerous (Haupt
2012, p. 153). Scott appears to have internalised these discourses and relays a sense of
disbelief at his current circumstances and how his life did not follow the trajectory of
a boy having grown up in a respectable, educated household.
Families who have experienced the upheaval of their lives being disrupted by
colonial and apartheid structural violences are often the very ones who, through
public and media narratives, end up carrying the stigma of that disruption. These
families become marked as ‘chaotic’, ‘alcoholic’ and ‘violent’ – lacking respecta-
bility. They carry the shame and stigma of what had been perpetrated against them.
Scott is grappling with feelings of shame as he attempts to reflect on what went
wrong in his childhood family as well as in his current one. As with Michael’ story,
Scott’s life narrative carries much complexity and shows how the meanings he
makes of himself and his family – as a mxn who had perpetrated IPV against his
partner – cannot be decontextualised from the larger story of his life, one that has
been shaped by colonial and apartheid patriarchy, and structural violence.
subjectivity as perpetrator was foregrounded. Our focus in this chapter counters and
problematises scholarship that explain the high levels of gender-based violence in
South Africa as a symptom of particular identities and statuses, that is, of black,
poor mxn with low education in decontextualised ways. Exploring men’s lives in
detail, it allows us to challenge and disrupt ideas that stereotypically position black
masculinities as inherently violent and shows the various pathways mxn have taken
to arrive at their current situations.
In this chapter, we have asked mxn to narrate about their violence within the
broader contexts of their histories and lives, and have placed a focus on the emanci-
patory and transformative potential of the life story interview to exemplify decolo-
nial feminist community psychology praxes. In its potential to espouse decolonial
feminist principles, the life story approach provided a space for the mxn’s narratives
about their vulnerabilities in their younger years to surface, showing how their lives
and histories have been shaped by structural violences of colonial racialised and
patriarchal arrangements and by apartheid. Their narratives show how racial mar-
ginalisation and male privilege are the key organising principles of everyday life in
colonial patriarchy (Irwin and Umemoto 2016). As articulated by Irwin and
Umemoto (2016), in relation to the position of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander
youth: “males are tasked with being protectors and providers while their families
were relegated to some of the most precarious positions in the economy and politi-
cal system” (p. 151). This sentiment is shared through the chapter’s findings, which
suggests that while colonial patriarchy considers mxn to be in positions of agency,
the system sets them up for economic, social and political precarity (ibid.).
In foregrounding mxn’s life histories, articulated in their own words, we have
also attempted to resist the ways in which academic discourse re-packages and re-
colonises the voice of the oppressed to reproduce stories of pain and oppression
(Tuck and Wayne Yang 2014). We have attempted to work against having mxn’s
narratives of pain circulate as “common tropes of dysfunction, abuse and neglect”
(ibid, p. 229) marking the oppressed in ways that continue the stigmatisation
invented by colonisation. Importantly, we also point to how mxn’s narratives about
their lives and histories have the potential to establish a renewed consciousness
about patriarchy and violence; the mxn’s interpretations of past events were brought
to the fore to allow taken-for-granted narratives of the past to be disrupted. Mxn’s
narratives show the potential to bring about conscientisation which illustrate how
the life history methodology may serve a practical, transformative function for part-
ner violent mxn. We argue that the life history approach has the potential to mobilise
mxn towards greater self-knowledge by building consciousness about how their his-
tories shaped their beliefs and perpetration of violence against partners, and thus,
holds the potential to exemplify principles of a decolonial feminist community
psychology.
56 T. van Niekerk and F. Boonzaier
References
Atkinson, R. (2012). In J. F. Gubrium, J. A. Holstein, A. B. Marvasti, & K. D. McKinney (Eds.),
The Sage handbook of interview research: The complexity of the craft (2nd ed., pp. 115–128).
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Bell, D. (2016). Retrieving psychosocial signs of structural violence in postcolonial Jamaica.
Community Psychology in Global Perspective, 2(2), 114–126.
Boonzaier, F. (2018). Challenging risk: The production of knowledge on gendered violence in
South Africa. In K. Fitz-Gibbon, S. Walklate, J. McCulloch, & J. Maree Maher (Eds.), Intimate
partner violence, risk and security: Securing women’s lives in a global world. London:
Routledge Press.
Boonzaier, F. A., & van Niekerk, T. J. (2018). “I’m here for abusing my wife”: South African men
constructing intersectional subjectivities through narratives of their violence. African Safety
Promotion: A Journal of Injury and Violence Prevention, 16(1), 2–19.
Chaudhry, L. N. (2016). Structural violence and the lives of Pakistani Christians: A collaborative
analysis. Community Psychology in Global Perspective, 2(2), 97–113.
Crenshaw, K. (1994). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence
against women of color. In M. A. Fineman & R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), The public nature of private
violence (pp. 93–118). New York: Routledge.
Gqola, P. D. (2007). How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender
based violence in contemporary South Africa. African Identities, 5(1), 111–124
Haupt, A. (2012). Static: race and representation in post-apartheid music, media and film. Cape
Town: HSRC Press.
Irwin, K., & Umemoto, K. (2016). Jacked up and unjust: Pacific Islander teens confront violent
legacies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jurkovic, G. J. (1997). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. London:
Brunner-Routledge.
Kessi, S., & Boonzaier, F. (2018). Centre/ing decolonial feminist psychology in Africa. South
African Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 299–309.
Kessi, S., & Cornell, J. (2015). Coming to the University of Cape Town: Black students, transfor-
mation and discourses of race. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 3(2), 1–16.
Mogotlane, S. M., Chauke, M. E., van Rensburg, G. H., Human, S. P., & Kganakga, C. M. (2010).
A situational analysis of child-headed households in South Africa. Curationis, 33(3), 24–32.
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist
Review, 30, 65–88.
Montero, M. (2009). Community action and research as citizen construction. American Journal of
Community Psychology, 43(1–2), 149–161.
Moolman, B. (2013). Rethinking ‘masculinities in transition’ in South Africa considering the
‘intersectionality’ of race, class, and sexuality with gender. African Identities, 11(1), 93–105.
Oyewumi, O. (2002). Conceptualising gender. The Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts.
Jenda, 2(3), no page numbers.
Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (2014). To humanize research. Preface. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.),
Humanizing research. Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. xiii–
xxii). Los Angeles: Sage.
Ratele, K. (2013a). Subordinate black South African men without fear. Cahiers d’Études afric-
aines, LIII(1–2), 247–268.
Ratele, K. (2013b). Of what value is feminism to black men? Communicatio, 39(2), 256–270.
Ratele, K. (2018). Engaging young male university students: Towards a situated, social-
psychological profeminist praxis. In T. Shefer, J. Hearn, K. Ratele, & F. Boonzaier (Eds.),
Engaging youth in activism, research, and pedagogical praxis: transnational and intersec-
tional perspectives on gender, sex, and race (pp. 93–109). New York: Routledge.
Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
The Life History Approach as a Decolonial Feminist Method? Contextualising Intimate… 57
Salo, E. (2007). Social construction of masculinity on the racial and gendered margins of Cape
Town. In T. Shefer, K. Ratele, A. Strebel, N. Shabalala, & R. Buikema (Eds.), 336 From boys to
men: social constructions of masculinity in contemporary society (pp. 160–180). Lansdowne:
UCT Press.
Seedat, M., MacKenzie, S., & Stevens, G. (2004). Trends and redress in community psychology
during 10 years of democracy (1994–2003): A journal-based perspective. South African jour-
nal of psychology, 34(4), 595–612.
Shefer, T., Hearn, J., & Ratele, K. (2015). North–South dialogues: reflecting on working transna-
tionally with young men, masculinities and gender justice. NORMA: International Journal for
Masculinity Studies, 10(2), 164–178.
Sonn, C. C., Stevens, G., & Duncan, N. (2013). Decolonisation, critical methodologies and why
stories matter. In G. Stevens, N. Duncan, & D. Hook (Eds.), Race, memory and the apartheid
archives: Towards a psychsocial praxis (pp. 295–314). Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Tuck, E., & Wayne Yang, K. (2014). R-Words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.),
Humanizing research. Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–
247). London: Sage.
Van Niekerk, T. J., & Boonzaier, F. A. (2016). “The only solution there is to fight”: Discourses of
masculinity among South African domestically violent men. Violence Against Women, 22(3),
271–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801214555473.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial
Feminist Praxis
Contents
Introduction 60
Background on Photovoice Methodology 60
Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis in Community Psychology 61
Photovoice, Participant Co-Authorship and Critical Reflexivity 63
Photovoice Study Background and Context at UCT 64
Critical Reflections on Photovoice Across Levels of Participation 65
Photovoice as a Participant 66
Photovoice as Student-Researchers 69
Photovoice as Supervisor and Mentor 72
Concluding Reflections 72
References 74
J. Cornell (*)
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa
South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence,
Injury and Peace Research Unit, Cape Town, South Africa
Institute for Social & Health Sciences, University of South Africa,
Johannesburg, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Mkhize
Institute for Social & Health Sciences, University of South Africa,
Johannesburg, South Africa
South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence,
Injury and Peace Research Unit, Cape Town, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Kessi
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
Photovoice, developed by Wang and Burris in the 1990s for public health research,
has been used within community psychology to explore multiple issues including
youth perceptions of safety (Suffla et al. 2015) and violence (Chonody et al. 2013);
fatherhood (Helman et al. 2018); and survival after political repression (Lykes et al.
2003).
Photovoice connects with community psychology’s stated – but often ignored in
practice (see Gokani and Walsh 2017) – goal of social change. Participants produce
photographs documenting aspects of their lives (Wang and Burris 1997; Wang
1999), which are then used to engage participants in critical group discussions about
the oppressive conditions of their lives and how to enact social change. These pho-
tographs are publically exhibited to key stakeholders and the broader community,
illuminating participants’ experiences and perspectives; presenting opportunities
for participants to engage with decision makers (Foster-Fisherman et al. 2005;
Wang 2006; Wang and Burris 1997); and sometimes resulting in concrete changes
in participants’ lives (e.g. see Bishop et al. 2013).
Photovoice thus espouses an emancipatory research paradigm positioning par-
ticipants as experts of their own lives, agents of change in their communities and
co-producers of knowledge in the research endeavour (Wang and Burris 1997).
Knowledge production is considered a participatory and collective process that mit-
igates the epistemic violence of much psychological research. However, participa-
tory research has been criticised for subtly reproducing power relations (Cooke and
Kothari 2001) and often participation ceases at the academic dissemination phase.
As we will examine below, for photovoice to enable emancipatory praxis we pro-
pose situating the methodology within decolonial feminist community psychology,
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 61
1
We use the term ‘womxn’ to allow space for individuals who identify as genderfluid, genderqueer,
gender non-conforming, or non-binary.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 63
Although photovoice has social justice and empowerment potential, theorists have
questioned whether in some applications of this method “much of its critical edge
has been diluted” (Lykes and Scheib 2015, p. 140) with the risk of reproducing power
inequity under the illusion of participatory action (Bishop et al. 2013). As Latz
(2017) highlights, acknowledging the influence of feminist theory on photovoice
does not guarantee that all aspects of a project will exemplify feminist principles.
Despite photovoice’s theoretical emphasis on participation, it is uncommon for par-
ticipants to be involved in the academic dissemination of the research (Evans-Agnew
and Rosemberg 2016; Sitter 2017). Only minimal published research articles have
photovoice participants as academic co-authors (e.g. Bishop et al. 2013). Evans-
Agnew’s and Rosemberg’s (2016) critical review of 21 photovoice studies concluded
that photovoice project designs vary in how participant voice is advanced, to the
extent that participant voice is most absent in the manuscript publication stage. This
absence is significant because researchers’ power is most often exercised in the pub-
lication and dissemination process (Lykes and Scheib 2015). There is a need to
reflect more thoroughly on whose voice is served in the academic publication of
participants’ photo-stories (Evans-Agnew and Rosemberg 2016). Participant co-
authorship has many important benefits. It ensures adequate credit is given to those
who have contributed to knowledge creation (Castleden et al. 2010); and it reinforces
the importance of considering perspectives and forms of knowledge from outside the
academy (Flicker and Nixon 2016). For those participants based in academic envi-
ronments (such as the participants in our study, who were university students), co-
authorship may also have direct professional advantages (Flicker and Nixon 2016).
Qualitative research generally, and feminist and decolonial frameworks particu-
larly, have highlighted the importance of considering researchers’ reflexivity. This
includes rejecting researcher neutrality; reflecting on the researcher’s intersecting
identities, their intentions, and their ideological assumptions; and considering the
power dynamics between researchers and participants (Burr 1995). In photovoice
projects, ongoing reflexivity ensures marginalised voices are centred and social
change is promoted, but also reveals the author’s influence and position. Despite
researchers’ ultimate control over photovoice project data dissemination and despite
the commitment to critical reflexivity in feminist research, researchers rarely reflect
on their positionality within PAR publications (Smith et al. 2010). The few photo-
voice researchers who have published critical reflections provide insight into the
varied dynamics within the photovoice process (e.g. Horwitz 2012; Suffla et al.
2015). Suffla et al. (2015), for example, utilise reflexivity to reveal the tensions,
power dynamics, and variabilities in their photovoice project on youth perceptions
of safety. In community psychologies drawing on critical paradigms, such as deco-
lonial feminist community psychology, changing oppressive and inequitable social
arrangements requires a reflexivity comprising both critical reflection and action
(Montero 2011; Suffla et al. 2015). As researchers we cannot challenge
epistemological violence embedded in research practice without “deep reflection on
64 J. Cornell et al.
the ways the intersectionality of our identities plays out in the framing, design and
interpretation of research” (Law 2016, p. 530). For a photovoice project to embody
PAR aims, and align with both Freirean theory and decolonial feminism’s attention
to transformative praxis and challenging power imbalances, researchers should
ensure reflective participation throughout the entire photovoice process, including
dissemination (Sitter 2017). As Evans-Agnew and Rosemberg (2016) recommend:
Given the underlying social justice intent of photovoice, and the primacy of privileging
participants with the ability to speak and the right to be heard, we are left to question
whether future photovoice researchers should rethink the fundamentals of their designs, and
engineer distinct strategies to advance participant voice in the analysis and dissemination of
photo-texts (p. 1028).
Until now, although participants in Shose and Josie’s work have been involved in
other forms of dissemination, despite our stated commitment to participatory
research none of our academic publications have included participants in co-
authorship roles. Shose and Josie have authored several publications on the project’s
findings (see Cornell and Kessi 2017; Kessi and Cornell 2015), including a publica-
tion in which we analysed Linda’s photovoice data (see Cornell et al. 2018). We
have tried to be sensitive to the participants’ voices. We produced the photographs
and captions unedited so the participants’ voices reach otherwise inaccessible audi-
ences directly. When participants used nudity to resist the University’s institutional
culture and requested that their photographs were uncensored, we agreed despite
discomfort around the naked body in academic publishing. However, we felt a truly
decolonial feminist reflection on the photovoice process should include partici-
pants’ perspectives more directly. In this collaborative chapter, by adopting a deco-
lonial feminist lens, we disrupt this, and reflect critically on the photovoice process
from three positionalities within a photovoice project: research participant, student-
researcher and academic supervisor. Specifically, we explore the enactment of deco-
lonial feminist mentorship in community psychology through the lens of a
photovoice project examining transformation at a South African university. Rather
than analysing Linda’s photo-stories, as Shose and Josie have done elsewhere,
Linda presents, reflects on and contextualises her own photo-stories as co-author
rather than subject. We argue this also addresses some of the ambiguous effects of
participation, being the ability for powerful institutions (such as academia) to define
the participatory process outcomes and we propose that this offers a method through
which to decolonise how research in the academy is traditionally carried out.
However, beyond a more representative student body, transformation has been slow,
inadequate and contested. As the RhodesMustFall2 and FeesMustFall3 student pro-
tests have highlighted, the University’s institutional culture privileges whiteness,
and many black students and staff experience alienation and exclusion. The photo-
stories created by the students in our studies have elucidated, amongst other things,
the curriculum’s Eurocentric focus; the colonial symbolism around campus; the
adherence to rigid gender binaries in the organisation of space; the lack of black
academic staff; and the dominance of stigmatising discourses around blackness
within the University. The students in the photovoice studies used their photo-stories
to resist the coloniality embedded within the University’s institutional culture and
emphasise the need to decolonise the institution.
Part of this study formed the basis of Josie’s Research Psychology Masters’ the-
sis, supervised by Shose. Linda, an undergraduate student in the Department of
Psychology at the time, was a participant in the 2015 stage of this project. Since her
participation in the project, Linda pursued psychology as a postgraduate and now
professionally. As a postgraduate student, Linda conducted her own photovoice
project exploring how blackness and gender/sexuality is navigated at a historically
white university.
2
RhodesMustFall is a student resistance movement initiated in 2015, which calls for the decoloni-
sation of higher education in South Africa.
3
FeesMustFall is a student resistance movement concerned with increased fees at South African
universities which further impede black, poor and/or historically disadvantaged students.
66 J. Cornell et al.
tion our own situatedness and whether our conceptual and methodological practices
can contribute to any kind of social justice. This project represented a ‘way in’ for
students at UCT, both as researchers and participants, to reflect on the idea of the
university, its role and its functioning through their own experiences of alienation
and belonging.
Photovoice as a Participant
Linda’s ‘way in’ was initially as a participant. As she reflects here below:
As the researched, I was involved in the photovoice project reflecting on the experiences of
black students at UCT. My then lecturer, Shose, who would later informally become a men-
tor to me, approached me to participate. After a focus group discussion and camera train-
ing, I was asked the question “what does it mean to be a black student at UCT?” and used
photography to answer this. Responding to this question verbally was straightforward as
there was already an ongoing conversation about transformation in the institution.
However, visually capturing what it meant to be a black student at UCT was a new and
exciting challenge. The challenge came with knowing what my lived experience was in this
body but being concerned with how I would meaningfully represent all of this in just a few
photographs. I have always known that I am black but it was through my university educa-
tion and experience that I came to understand what that truly meant on a larger scale. Each
of my social science classes contributed differently to my growing critical consciousness,
which unquestionably developed alongside this photovoice project. The answer to the
aforementioned question included photographs of the base on which the Cecil John Rhodes4
statue once sat (see Fig. 1 and 2).
This photograph spoke to how fulfilling it was to have been a part of the process of
getting the statue removed. Simultaneously, the remaining base was a painful
reminder of how institutional racism remained even after the physical statue had
been removed.
Additionally, I photographed (see Fig. 3) the doors and names of nine academics in
the Mechanical Engineering department which I felt demonstrated the skewed
racial and gender representation of academics at UCT.
In hindsight, my understanding of blackness was narrow and non-intersectional. I had
expected that other participants would have similar experiences to me and that each photo-
story would reiterate what others had captured. In my photo-stories, I spoke about and,
more importantly, reflected on the range of experiences related to my racial identity. This
included my involvement in the #RhodesMustFall movement, expressing my frustration with
the lack of black academics in my department/university and speaking about the rude
awakening that came with encountering microaggressions inside and outside the lecture
halls. There was a moment of reflection of my gendered experience which meant speaking
4
Cecil John Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in the late 1800s. He implemented
multiple laws forcing black people off their land. He bequeathed the land on the slopes of Devil’s
Peak (the site of the University’s Upper Campus) as the site for UCT and despite being a reviled
figure the statue commemorating his memory was displayed at UCT until the RhodesMustFall
student protests in 2015 forced its removal.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 67
Figs. 1 and 2 Cecil John Rhodes Is Still Here: The above pictures were taken where the Cecil John
Rhodes statue used to sit. Now you will find the stand with the words “C.J waz here!” and a shadow
of the statue spray-painted in the same area. The #RhodesMustFall movement was an attempt at
racial transformation at UCT. However, even though the physical removal of CJR was a great
achievement, there is still a lot of racist actions within the institution. In my particular experience,
the drawing of the CJR shadow is representative of a lack of empathy for the struggles of black
students at UCT. It is painful to think that someone thought it would be funny or necessary to paint
this shadow of CJR after students had articulated their struggles during the RMF movement
68 J. Cornell et al.
Fig. 3 What’s in a name? The above pictures are of several names of the lecturers/professors in
the Mechanical Engineering department. Here I attempted to show the lack of racial and gender
representation within UCT. One of my biggest struggles has been that I seldom see people who
look like me at the front of the classroom. The lack of diversity, in terms of race and gender, but
also in terms of disability, sexual orientations, religion, etc. is concerning at such a university. A
transformed UCT is one where these doors represent all types of social identities
on the lack of women academics and then having to find sisterhood with other black women
lecturers and friends to compensate for this. Looking back again, I realise that I did not
account for my able-bodied or cisgender privileges, nor mention my sexuality. It was during
the photo-sharing portion of this photovoice project that I realised that the experience of
being a black student at UCT was tremendously nuanced. One participant revealed the dif-
ficulty of being black while transgender and having to plot something as simple as going to
the bathroom. Another participant highlighted how coming from a disadvantaged back-
ground and surviving at UCT was almost impossible. One other participant pointed out the
difficulty of having a mental and/or physical illness and physically navigating and success-
fully completing one’s studies. At this point I fully comprehended the many ways people
experience their blackness. I came to better understand that is not only about race but also
class, gender, sexual, mental/physical ability amongst other factors.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 69
Photovoice as Student-Researchers
was rooted deeply in her personhood, Josie describes herself as a privileged white
student whose experience at UCT was characterised by belonging:
Shose invited me to complete my dissertation as part of a photovoice research project she
had conceptualised around black students’ experiences in higher education. Shose made the
decision to focus the research project on black students’ experiences, based on the impor-
tance of centring and highlighting the voices of students who at that stage in 2013 (the
project began prior to the RhodesMustFall movement and large scale student resistance
initiated and lead by black students) were often silenced in discussions around higher edu-
cation transformation in South Africa.
For example, the participants were actively involved decision making around the
public exhibitions of the photo-stories. The participants gave speeches and shared
their experiences at the exhibition opening nights, to an audience including high-
ranking members of the university administration. In this way, the participants were
able to speak directly to otherwise inaccessible institutional decision makers. Some
participants also took ownership over the exhibits and used the photo-stories in their
own events which were not part of the photovoice project or initiated by the research-
ers. Linda’s own reflection on the exhibition as a participant, illustrates how the
exhibition was able to do this and the benefits that can be gained from the PAR
process. As Linda describes:
At the end of this photovoice project, there was an exhibition where each participant had a
board displaying their consolidated photo-stories. Fellow participants, students, lecturers
and university stakeholders such as deans and heads of departments attended. It was both
empowering and intimidating to have my work exhibited – especially considering the topic.
The planning process was equally empowering because there was freedom in deciding how
pictures would be displayed and when/how the event would run. Other participants took the
opportunity to speak directly to the audience – an audience they would otherwise have been
unable to access. This process allowed me to begin to build relationships with other s tudents
and lecturers who I might have never have engaged with had I not been a part of the ven-
ture. Years later, these relationships have benefitted me personally and professionally. It
was the openness and fluidity of the photovoice process that facilitated the development of
such relationships.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 71
However, although the PAR process created space for participants’ active participa-
tion and benefitted participants such as Linda, the research space was still influ-
enced by Josie’s position as a white researcher:
My whiteness may have affected, for example, how comfortably participants spoke about
race at UCT in front of me. In her study of staff experiences of transformation at a previ-
ously white South African university, Ismail (2011) found that, as a fellow black academic,
most participants considered her an ‘insider’ and thus felt comfortable discussing their
experiences with her. In some ways, I was an ‘insider’, doing research on my own univer-
sity, with fellow students often from the same department. However, the position of ‘insider’
is not fixed, and what is deemed ‘inside’ depends on my varied identity positionings (Trowler
2016). My whiteness and other normative intersecting identities afforded me substantial
privileges within the university’s structure compared to many of the participants. Due to
this ‘insider/outsider’ tension and status, I attempted to ensure participants felt comfortable
and secure when discussing their (often painful) experiences in front of me. I think part of
what helped is that the photovoice process started with focus groups in which, in terms of
race, the participants outnumbered me as the white researcher (five in each group). In fact,
the participants appeared to be comfortable being critical of white students at UCT even in
the focus groups I (a white UCT student) was leading. I think what also helped was that my
co-researchers5 were black, and except for some focus groups, they lead many of the inter-
actions with the participants, such as the workshops in which the participants discussed
their ideas for their photo-stories. I think having black academics from senior positions
discuss these issues with the participants validated their experiences and ensured they felt
secure voicing their perspectives. Although, this does not negate the presence of my white
body in this space.
Joy Moodley (as an honours student) and Professor Kopano Ratele of the University of South
5
Concluding Reflections
https://www.facebook.com/UCTfeministdecolonialpsychology/
6
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 73
Josie Concludes
I think my involvement in this project, while fraught with complex power dynamics and
practices (such as academic publishing) which reinscribe my privilege, working with par-
ticipant co-researchers, such as Linda, and under Shose’s decolonial feminist supervision
has been crucial in helping me along the ongoing and incomplete process of learning to
enact a decolonial feminist praxis in community psychology.
Shose Reflects
This particular project was highly successful in achieving many of the stated aims: it gained
visibility at the highest institutional levels; student participants became involved in politi-
cal mobilisation and action beyond the project’s scope, such as RhodesMustFall and
FeesMustFall; Linda chose a photovoice project for her honours research; Josie wrote a
first class Master’s thesis; and, up until today, we are receiving ongoing requests for pre-
sentations and dissemination of the photo-stories in various channels within and beyond the
university both nationally and internationally. I attribute these successes largely to the
ways in which the participatory, creative, affective and visible aspects of photovoice meth-
ods enabled participants to feel recognised and empowered within and beyond the project.
A decolonial feminist lens enabled us to build openness and trust in which students shared
deeply traumatic experiences because of the critical ways in which these experiences were
located and understood in a social historical context, and not reduced to personal failure.
This particular project significantly impacted my professional advancement at UCT.
The stories told by our participants gained the attention of the senior leadership at UCT. In
the first presentation of the findings at UCT in 2014, the then vice-chancellor, Dr Max Price
unexpectedly attended the seminar. This was followed by multiple presentations and exhibi-
tions in the various UCT faculties. I was subsequently invited to be an advisor on the
Special Executive Task Team in the midst of the 2016 student protests. This project along
with my other decolonial work has brought much attention in the university on how to
embody a decolonial agenda for South African higher education.
authorship may not always be possible or advisable. Some participants may wish to
remain anonymous. There is also a risk that the participant co-authors may appear
to speak for all participants (Castleden et al. 2010). Some participants may not wish
to co-author on academic publications as they are largely inaccessible and are impli-
cated in a history of serving dominant colonial interests. Participants may also feel
that there are more valuable uses of their time, and methods of dissemination better
suited to their needs (Flicker and Nixon 2016). Despite the value of photovoice and
our ability to extend its participatory imperative through the present co-authorship,
it remains to be seen whether and how such a practice can be replicated in and with
other participant communities.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank the participants for sharing their experiences and for
the effort and creativity they put into creating their photo-stories. We would like to acknowledge
Joy Moodley and Professor Kopano Ratele for their involvement as co-researchers in various
stages of this project. We would like to thank our reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.
References
Adams, G., Gómez Ordóñez, L., Kurtiş, T., Molina, L. E., & Dobles, I. (2017). Notes on decoloniz-
ing psychology: From one special issue to another. South Africa Journal of Psychology, 47(4),
531–541.
Bishop, J., Robillard, L., & Moxley, D. (2013). Linda’s story through photovoice: Achieving inde-
pendent living with dignity and ingenuity in the face of environmental inequities. Practice,
25(5), 297–315.
Burr, V. (1995). An introduction to social constructionism. London: Routledge.
Burton, M., Kagan, C., & Duckett, P. (2012). Making the psychological political–challenges for
community psychology. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 3(4), 1–11.
Castleden, H., Morgan, V. S., & Neimanis, A. (2010). Researchers’ perspectives on collective/
community co-authorship in community-based participatory indigenous research. Journal of
Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 5(4), 23–32.
Chonody, J., Ferman, B., Amitrani-Welsh, J., & Martin, T. (2013). Violence through the eyes of
youth: A photovoice exploration. Journal of Community Psychology, 41(1), 84–101. https://
doi.org/10.1002/jcop.21515.
Coemans, S., Raymakers, A. L., Vandenabeele, J., & Hannes, K. (2017). Evaluating the extent to
which social researchers apply feminist and empowerment frameworks in photovoice studies
with female participants: A literature review. Qualitative Social Work. Online publication. DOI:
1473325017699263.
Coimbra, J. L., Duckett, P., Fryer, D., Makkawi, I., Menezes, I., Seedat, M., & Walker, C. (2012).
Rethinking community psychology: Critical insights. The Australian Community Psychologist,
24(2), 135–142.
Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (Eds.). (2001). Participation: The new tyranny? New York: Zed books.
Cornell, J., & Kessi, S. (2017). Black students’ experiences of transformation at a previously
‘white only’ South African university: A photovoice study. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(11),
1882–1899.
Cornell, J., Kessi, S., & Ratele, K. (2018). Dynamics of privilege, identity and resistance at a his-
torically white university: A photovoice study of exclusionary institutional culture. In N. Oke,
C. Sonn, & A. Baker (Eds.), Places of Privilege: Interdisciplinary perspectives on identities,
change and resistance (pp. 173–193). Dordrecht: Brill Sense Publishers.
Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis 75
Evans-Agnew, R. A., & Rosemberg, M. A. S. (2016). Questioning photovoice research: Whose
voice? Qualitative Health Research, 26(8), 1019–1030.
Flicker, S., & Nixon, S. A. (2016). Writing peer-reviewed articles with diverse teams: Considerations
for novice scholars conducting community-engaged research. Health Promotion International,
33(1), 152–161.
Foster-Fisherman, P., Nowell, B., Deacon, Z., Nievar, M. A., & McCann, P. (2005). Using methods
that matter: The impact of reflection, dialogue and voice. American Journal of Community
Psychology, 36, 275–293.
Gokani, R., & Walsh, R. T. (2017). On the historical and conceptual foundations of a community
psychology of social transformation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 59(3–4),
284–294.
Heleta, S. (2016). Decolonisation of higher education: Dismantling epistemic violence and euro-
centrism in South Africa. Transformation in Higher Education, 1(1), 1–8.
Helman, R., Malherbe, N., & Kaminer, D. (2018). Young people’s reproductions of the ‘father as
provider’ discourse: Intersections of race, class, culture and gender within a liberal democracy.
Community, Work & Family, 22, 146–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2018.1433636.
Horwitz, J. R. (2012). Photovoice as a critical reflection methodology. In Agency through teacher
education: Reflection, community, and learning (pp. 15–24).
Howarth, C., Andreouli, E., & Kessi, S. (2014). Social representations and the politics of participa-
tion. In P. Nesbitt-Larking, K. Kinnvall, T. Capelos, & H. Dekker (Eds.), The Palgrave hand-
book of global political psychology. Palgrave studies in political psychology series (pp. 19–38).
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ismail, S. (2011). Researching transformation at a South African university: Ethical dilemmas in
the politics of representation. Studies in Higher Education, 36(3), 275–289.
Kelly, K. J., & Birdsall, K. (2010). The effects of national and international HIV/AIDS funding and
governance mechanisms in the development of civil society responses to HIV/AIDS in East
and Southern Africa. AIDS Care, 22(Supplement 2), 1580–1587.
Kessi, S. (2011). Photovoice as a practice of re-presentation and social solidarity: Experiences from
a youth empowerment project in Dar es Salaam and Soweto. Papers on Social Representations,
20(1), 7.1–7.27.
Kessi, S., & Boonzaier, F. (2017). Resistance and transformation in postcolonial contexts. In
C. Howarth & E. Andreouli (Eds.), The social psychology of everyday politics (pp. 116–130).
London: Routledge.
Kessi, S., & Cornell, J. (2015). Coming to UCT: Black students, transformation and discourses of
race. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 3(2), 1–16.
Kiguwa, P. (2004). Feminist critical psychology in South Africa. In Hook et al. (Eds.), Critical
Psychology (pp. 278–315). Cape Town: UCT Press.
Latz, A. (2017). Photovoice research in education and beyond: A practical guide from theory to
exhibition. New York: Routledge.
Law, S. F. (2016). Unknowing researcher’s vulnerability: Re-searching inequality on an uneven
playing field. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 4(2), 521–536.
Long, W. (2013). Rethinking “relevance”: South African psychology in context. History of
Psychology, 16(1), 19–35.
Lykes, M. B., & Scheib, H. (2015). The artistry of emancipatory practice: Photovoice, creative
techniques, and feminist anti-racist participatory action research. In H. Bradbury (Ed.), The
SAGE handbook of action research (3rd ed., pp. 130–141). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Lykes, M. B., Terre Blanche, M., & Hamber, B. (2003). Narrating survival and change in
Guatemala and South Arica: The politics of representation and a liberatory community psy-
chology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1–2), 79–90. https://doi.org/10.10
23/A:1023074620506.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2011). Thinking through the decolonial turn: Post-continental interventions
in theory, philosophy, and critique – an introduction. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2), 1–15.
76 J. Cornell et al.
Montero, M. (2011). A critical look at critical community psychology. Social and Personality
Psychology Compass, 5(12), 950–959.
Orford, J. (2008). Community psychology: Challenges, controversies and emerging consensus.
West Sussex: John Wiley.
Seckinelgin, H. (2012). The global governance of success in HIV/AIDS policy: Emergency action,
everyday lives and Sen’s capabilities. Health & Place, 18(3), 453–460.
Seedat, M., & Lazarus, S. (2011). Community psychology in South Africa: Origins, developments,
and manifestations. Journal of Community Psychology, 39(3), 241–257.
Sitter, K. C. (2017). Taking a closer look at photovoice as a participatory action research method.
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 28(1), 36–48.
Smith, L., Rosenzweig, L., & Schmidt, M. (2010). Best practices in the reporting of participatory
action research: Embracing both the forest and the trees. The Counseling Psychologist, 38(8),
1115–1138.
Suffla, S., Seedat, M., & Bawa, U. (2015). Reflexivity as enactment of critical community psy-
chologies: Dilemmas of voice and positionality in a multi-country photovoice study. Journal of
Community Psychology, 43(1), 9–21.
Trowler, P. (2016). Doing insider research in universities. Lancaster: Author.
Wang, C. C. (1999). Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy applied to women’s
health. Journal of Women’s Health, 8(2), 185–192. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.1999.8.185.
Wang, C. C. (2006). Youth participation in photovoice as a strategy for community change. Journal
of Community Practice, 14(1–2), 147–161.
Wang, C. C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory
needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387.
White, S. (1996). Depoliticising development: The uses and abuses of participation. Development
in Practice, 6(1), 6–15.
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist
Community Psychologies Through Youth-
Centred Participatory Film-Making
Contents
Introduction 77
Interrogating Mainstream Feminisms and Malestream Community Psychologies 78
Mainstream Feminisms 79
Malestream Community Psychologies 80
Articulating Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies 81
Power and Coming-to-Voice 82
Participatory Film-Making as Community-Engaged, Feminist Methodology 83
The Engaging Youth Project 85
Participatory Film-Making and Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies 86
Summary and Concluding Thoughts 91
References 92
Introduction
the need for transforming society in a manner that ends the marginalisation of
women (and, we would add, gender non-conforming people, LGBTQIA+ persons
and anyone else living under the heel of patriarchy). Feminism is more than an
account of oppression; it provides people with tools for understanding and changing
their situation without succumbing to it (Lugones 2010). Community psychology,
on the other hand, is an effort to shift psychological services beyond an individual,
one-on-one basis, towards the level of community so that psychology is able to
serve disenfranchised populations more effectively (Rappaport 1977). However,
with mainstream iterations of both feminism and community psychology having
roots in coloniality (see Kurtiş and Adams 2015), conceptions of justice within each
can, and often do, serve to bolster oppression in numerous ways.
Mainstream Feminisms
Power and Coming-to-Voice
In this section, we argue that a feminist youth-centred PAR is able to foster among
young people a combination of enabling power and coming-to-voice. Indeed, if
young people are to become change-making agents, that is, if they are to be politi-
cal, they must have access to the kind of speech/voice from which they are structur-
ally denied (see Gordon 2017). Following this, feminisms and/or community
psychologies are not inherently liberatory in their ability to facilitate speech/voice.
Rather, their emancipatory potential emanates from their ability to facilitate coming-
to-voice, that is, the process of moving from silent to speaking subjects who are able
to use their voices to enact social change (see hooks 1989). Sustainable change is
then dependent on how coming-to-voice is harnessed.
Gordon (2017) notes that power is frequently understood solely in relation to its
coercive qualities (e.g. state power). However, power can also be conceived as polit-
ically enabling. We might think of such power simply as “the ability to make things
happen, to make the possible actual” (Gordon 2017, p. 39), which would necessarily
include the dismantling and/or reconstitution of colonial epistemes. Building on
this, we posit that by utilising coming-to-voice as a means of engaging an enabling
conception of power, space is created wherein participants may articulate and enact
decolonising feminist futures, which interrogate the coloniality of being and know-
ing (Walsh 2015).
PAR has been drawn into feminist (e.g. Lykes and Coquillon 2007) and commu-
nity psychology (e.g. Mitchell and de Lange 2011) engagements. It follows then
that a particular kind of PAR represents one way of imagining how praxes marked
by decolonial feminist community psychologies are able to facilitate people’s
enabling power through their coming-to-voice. PAR, in its most general sense, is an
empirical methodological approach in which people affected by a problem engage
as experts and as co-researchers with this problem in order to address it meaning-
fully (Rodríguez and Brown 2009). Speaking to the absence of feminisms in tradi-
tional enactments of PAR, Lykes and Coquillon (2007) formulate a feminist-infused
PAR that repositions gender, race and class so that together researchers and partici-
pants can facilitate in their work knowledge construction, education, collaboration,
learning, reflection, conscientisation and transformative action. By using feminist
PAR to represent meaning in a manner that is sensitive to issues of gender and patri-
archy, and to build expansive feminist knowledges, we are able to address questions
related to gendered, raced, classed and ‘bodied’ hierarchies of knowledge creation
and dissemination (Reid and Frisby 2007).
There is a lack of feminist PAR work that explicitly engages with young people
(see Sánchez 2009 for a notable exception). Working with young people in this
manner would serve as a necessary corrective to the kind of PAR that strives to
‘give’ young people voice so that they are able to exercise power through estab-
lished communicative channels (that is, normalised patriarchal-colonial avenues of
expression), which function to structure participation along lines of liberal respect-
ability (Rodríguez and Brown 2009). Feminism’s sensitivity to gendered power dif-
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies Through… 83
ferentials in particular may then ensure that PAR does not fall back on framing
youth engagement and agency within limited, binary and monolithic hermeneutic
frameworks. We posit that a youth-centred feminist PAR, conceived as an enact-
ment of decolonial feminist community psychology praxis, positions young people
as change agents who, together with researchers, act to engage reflectively with the
research process, while striving towards decolonising expressions of politicisation,
resistance and radical inclusion.
In what follows, we draw on a specific instance of our community-engaged work
that saw young people produce a participatory film on teenage pregnancy. The proj-
ect sought to aggrandise the voices of young people – which are frequently neglected
in both feminist and community psychology engagements – in order to facilitate a
politics of recognition that connects young people’s experiences to decolonising
feminist activism. However, in acknowledging that feminist and decolonial knowl-
edge praxes are not homogenous, we must recognise, reflexively, that confronting
coloniality is often contaminated by dominant imperial cultures.
making, Video Culture explored how young people from around the world (Germany,
England, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the US), between the ages of 14 and 19,
produced, exchanged and understood various films, all while examining transcul-
tural audio-visual languages (Niesyto et al. 2003). Both Video Culture and The
Odenwald Study are important in showcasing the centring of youth and youth inter-
ests within participatory film-making. However, although commendable examples
of youth-centred participatory film-making, the projects point to the budget con-
straints that may face groups from marginalised contexts seeking to undertake simi-
lar initiatives.
Poverty in the South African context has formed the focus of a number of youth-
centred participatory film-making projects. Mitchell and de Lange (2011), for
instance, implemented a community video project entitled Izindaba Zethu (isiZulu
for “Our Stories”) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, with 19 senior secondary
school students and a number of adults. After receiving training in producing films,
each of the participants produced a three-minute film. Collectively, the films focused
on rape, gender violence and poverty, and were publicly screened in the partici-
pants’ community. In another example, Moletsane and her colleagues (2009)
worked with young women in a rural South African setting to produce a participa-
tory film entitled It All Began with Poverty, which examined their experiences of
poverty and HIV and AIDS as a means of reflexively envisioning change initiatives.
Although these projects harness feminism and community-centredness to varying
degrees and in different ways, they were not geared explicitly towards challenging
coloniality. Further, they did not comprehensively explore the participatory charac-
ter of the method, or the ways by which it enabled participants to resist, reinscribe
and articulate their experiences of coloniality.
Considering the above, we argue that, with respect to their change-making capaci-
ties, participatory film-making projects should connect to broader social justice
movements that defend and react to, but also foster the insurgence of, those who exist
outside of Euro-modern hegemony (also see Walsh 2015). An important concept in
this regard is Fals-Borda’s (1985) comunidades de base (directly translated from
Spanish as base communities), which seeks to link PAR to community-driven radical
collectives and bottom-up structures that are not tied to state apparatuses. In respond-
ing to the relatively few enactments of community psychology that are associated
with radical, progressive and/or transformative social movements, praxes defined by
decolonial feminist community psychologies are challenged to harness comunidades
de base towards the construction of spaces wherein critical, actional responses to
coloniality are developed, as is the generation of political, transformative, ethical and
accountable modes of psychological recovery and healing (Zavala 2013).
Participatory film-making has shown to engender a sense of purpose and critical
reflection among young people (Moletsane et al. 2009), while holding the potential
to make critical contact with other community members. In this regard, youth voice
is brought into the kinds of authoritative discursive spaces typically afforded to
adults, thereby disrupting hegemonic power hierarchies. Further, the method allows
black people; the economically, historically and socially disenfranchised; as well as
feminised, queer and/or disabled bodies to be heard by others, thus facilitating the
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies Through… 85
shot the film over a single afternoon at the participants’ school. For a more in-depth
background discussion of the Engaging Youth Project, as well as a critical consider-
ation of its procedure, participatory issues, ethical enactments and limitations, see
Malherbe and Everitt-Penhale (2017).
Although the Engaging Youth Project was initially conceived theoretically as
aligning with feminist community psychology, upon reflection, it became clear that
it had also interacted with decoloniality (and coloniality) in a number of ways.
Below, we reflexively consider how the Engaging Youth Project engaged principles
of decolonial feminist community psychologies.
If we are to engage the complex manner by which the film component of the
Engaging Youth Project attended to principles of decolonial feminist community
psychologies, it is, for the sake of clarity, perhaps best to do so at the three distinct
stages of film-making described by Fiske (1987). These stages include: the produc-
tion text (the process of film-making); the primary text (the film product); and the
secondary text (audience reactions to the film).
parochially understood as who was represented in the film, but rather how such
representation was constructed, and for what purposes. Shots and dialogue were
also constantly revised during filming and, in this sense, participants demonstrated
an awareness of how both the content and the form of their film contributed to the
ways by which the topic of the film was engaged.
Throughout the production text, the facilitator (a white, English-speaking female)
occupied a somewhat contradictory position. She was not to obscure the coming-to-
voice process that was so essential to the project’s aims, yet, at the same time, was
to guide the film-making process in a manner that encouraged participants’ critical
attitude towards hegemonic power structures pertaining to the issues considered in
the film. This saw the facilitator attempting to promote feminist ideals, including
critical engagement with gendered issues in the film, without coercing the partici-
pants to align with the kinds of myopic and imperial feminisms that most closely
speak to experiences of whiteness (see Grey 2004). As discussed elsewhere (see
Malherbe and Everitt-Penhale 2017), the Engaging Youth Project’s longitudinal
researcher-participant relationship moderated some of the tensions that mark the
facilitator’s role in participatory research. Indeed, when the facilitator posed chal-
lenges to participants – with respect to coloniality and/or patriarchy – she drew on
the arguments and critiques that participants themselves had formulated in earlier
discussions. In this way, coming-to-voice was engaged in a way that was sensitive,
open and alert to the progressions and regressions of individual voices.
Although the longitudinal engagement mitigated slightly the instating of an all-
knowing and authoritative facilitator, there remained a power differential predicated
on an institutionally-located, gendered, raced and classed facilitator. In this regard,
an ontological – and possibly also epistemic – distance reinscribed onto the research
space various strands of coloniality. Indeed, the white facilitator assisted partici-
pants in a way that she determined decolonising and, perhaps more explicitly, femi-
nist. The manner by which participants represented resistance to oppressive
circumstances was then, unwittingly, predicated on terms of engagement con-
structed by the kinds of power and privilege available to, and afforded by, the facili-
tator’s raced, institutional and classed positionalities. Upon reflection, the
coming-to-voice process, while participatory and critical, was also constrained by
the very systems of oppression that it intended to challenge. At different moments,
the facilitator – although supervised throughout the project by an experienced
researcher who attempted to ensure that the project remained as participatory as
possible – may have been too far removed from experiences of coloniality to have
confronted this sensitively and/or legitimately.
To interrogate how coloniality shaped the facilitation of this project, we attempted
to conceptualise and articulate a form of decolonial pedagogy (see Walsh 2015).
However, the conversations between participants and facilitators – in an effort to
learn, unlearn and relearn particular practices of and complicities in oppression –
may not have optimally engaged the power hierarchies, epistemes, positionalities
and subjectivities that came to characterise this space. By muting the oppressive cur-
rents that operate in all research spaces, coloniality exerts influence over the research
process in ways that are subtle and therefore powerful. Making visible in a conversa-
88 N. Malherbe et al.
tional and pedagogical context the coloniality, complexities and limitations of com-
ing-to-voice within certain environments may then act to conscientise facilitators and
participants. In this way, facilitators are able to embody their inherently contradic-
tory role, while interrogating and challenging any complicity with coloniality.
The focus of the participants’ film – teenage pregnancy in the context of a low-
income South African township – spoke to a broader socio-discursive backdrop. In
South Africa, legacies of slavery, colonialism and apartheid have rendered the
notion of ‘family’ and ‘home’ immensely complex sites of generational trauma and
oppression (see Gqola 2010). Added to this, the ongoing neoliberal capitalist project
undertaken in South Africa ratifies and arbitrarily naturalises the heteropatriarchal
nuclear family as the healthiest possible familial arrangement (see Helman et al.
2019).
To offer a brief synopsis of the film, a romantic relationship develops between
two high school learners, Asanda and Lucas, neither of whom were sexually active
prior to their relationship. After Lucas declares his love for Asanda, the two have
unprotected sex, which results in Asanda’s pregnancy. Facing rejection from her
mother and Lucas upon the discovery of her pregnancy, Asanda turns to her extended
family for support. Lucas, following his initial dissociation from Asanda, attempts
to reconcile with her. She makes the decision to discontinue her relationship with
him and chooses to focus on child-rearing and her schoolwork. Although disap-
pointed by Asanda’s decision, Lucas remains part of the child’s life.
In approaching the film, which participants titled My Teenage Years, as a cultural
artefact, we are aware that it subscribes to principles of a decolonial feminist com-
munity psychology in a manner that is uneven, contradictory and open to interpreta-
tion. While we acknowledge that our reading of the film, like any text, is undoubtedly
coloured, shaped, restricted, informed and enabled by our respective identities, we
nonetheless offer an interpretation of how the film engaged principles of feminist
decolonial community psychologies. Our interpretation serves as one among many
modalities for exploring the kinds of conversations for which the film allows (and
perhaps also disallows). For us, one of the most striking features of the film is
Asanda’s agency, which is gradually enhanced through the film’s narrative slide into
centralising Asanda’s story over that of any other character. Examples of such
agency are noted throughout the film. During their pre-coital conversation, Asanda
does not declare her love for Lucas as explicitly as he does for her; yet, it is Asanda
who instructs Lucas to “lock the door”. Although it is Asanda that asks Lucas for a
condom, she appears excited, rather than resigned, to continue without one. In this
way, patriarchal constructions of femininity as fragile, ever-responsible and passive
are rejected. Later in the film, Asanda responds to her mother’s and Lucas’s with-
drawal (Lucas by coldly accusing her of sleeping with other men, and her mother by
forbidding her to live in the family home), by creating a family that does not sub-
scribe to the nuclear heteropatriarchal ideal. Asanda therefore builds a family in
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies Through… 89
accordance to her own will, choosing to see Lucas again after 3 months. What
emerges as the film’s meta-narrative is Asanda’s story, and her agency in shaping it.
In constructing their film, participants appear to have remained sensitive to the
kinds of systemic oppression that poor, black South Africans face, especially young
black women. It is clear that Asanda’s story – marked by gendered discrimination
and a lack of support – is not anomalous. We are reminded of this through the patri-
archal and discriminatory discourses on which Asanda’s mother, as well as the
respective friendship groups of Lucas and Asanda, draw when learning of Asanda’s
pregnancy. Further, Asanda herself grew up in a single-mother household, which
does not seem to appear in the film as an indictment of this family form, but rather
as an allusion to its commonality in post-apartheid white-supremacist, capitalist
patriarchal South Africa. Masculinity is also considered in interesting ways in the
film. When Lucas’s friends discover that he has not yet had sex, he is verbally chas-
tised. As viewers, we are made to feel that such peer pressure drives his decision-
making in choices around sex, as well as his initial abandonment of Asanda.
Hegemonic masculine performance then comes to harm both Lucas and Asanda, the
latter of whom, towards the end of the film, rejects Lucas’s pleas to continue their
relationship. Participants debated among themselves and the facilitator whether
Lucas would come to embody a fathering role or abandon Asanda altogether. It was
eventually decided that, in an attempt to demonstrate a positive kind of masculinity
(one that popular discourse so often denies to black men), Lucas would – after his
initial rejection – engage fathering outside of the traditional nuclear family form, in
accordance with Asanda’s decision.
There were, however, times when we understood the film as slipping into a kind
of moralising discourse which obscures instances of systemic oppression. Exemplary
here was the repeated emphasis on Asanda and Lucas having to take responsibility
for their “mistake”. With each party appearing perpetually at fault, structural con-
siderations were dislocated for an individualising hermeneutic. Although it could be
argued that, in this way, the film highlights the individualising impulse of dominant
neocolonial discourses in South Africa, in our understanding, one of the central
ways that young people in the film come to a kind of self-actualisation is through
their embrace of individualism.
The film appears to offer visceral and youth-centred insights into gender, pov-
erty, teenage pregnancy and coloniality as they intersect within South Africa’s lib-
eral democracy. In considering the above, we might also refer to Fanon’s (1967)
insistence that psychic distress experienced by colonised subjects can be located in
systems of coloniality. In relation to the film’s open-ended and unresolved ending,
we may also return to Martín-Baró’s (1994) liberation psychology, which shifts
mainstream psychology’s analytical focus on the individualised psyche as the
source of malady, to imagining and developing new, liberatory horizons, episte-
mologies and critical praxes. Perhaps then, new interpretations of the film and sug-
gestions of how it could be used towards emancipatory ends will enable us to
embody liberatory imaginings in a manner that brings together the insights of Fanon
and Martín-Baró towards praxes marked by decolonial feminist community
psychologies.
90 N. Malherbe et al.
After participants, working with researchers and filmmakers, had produced their
film, they began working on setting up a public screening event. This is important
for igniting critical dialogue and promoting participants’ ownership of their work
(Malherbe and Everitt-Penhale 2017). After a few weeks of promoting the event
(through word-of-mouth, as well as using posters and flyers that they had designed
and disseminated), participants hosted the event at their school. The venue reached
maximum capacity and, to promote youth-driven authority that disrupts the adult-
centric spatial arrangements on which much community psychology typically
relies, participants led, facilitated and organised the screening. They chaired the
event, explained to the audience how they understood their film and its social con-
tribution, and performed songs and poetry. In this way, modalities of participatory
(un)learning that occurred in the production text informed the constitution of the
secondary text.
In planning the event, we met with participants to discuss how to link the second-
ary text to organised resistance struggles, solidarity formations and potentialities of
critical, enabling power – that is, activating Fals-Borda’s (1985) comunidades de
base. With homophobia highlighted by the group in an earlier stage of the project as
an issue warranting attention, participants decided that a community activist associ-
ated with the human rights organisation Free Gender should open the event. Founded
in 2008, Free Gender is a prolific community-based organisation that focuses on the
liberation of queer black women living in South Africa, as well as eradicating
homophobia and gender-based violence more generally. A spokesperson from the
organisation discussed violence faced by queer people living in impoverished com-
munities in South Africa. Here, comunidades de base functioned in two ways:
firstly, by speaking to homophobic violence within a space that was seemingly
focused on the specific issue of teenage pregnancy, connections were made between
gender oppression and other violences. This then opened up a discussion on com-
plex forms of structural domination. Secondly, participants and audience members
were made aware of how patriarchal systems depicted in the film are being effec-
tively resisted in organised ways. As a method of political conscientisation (infre-
quently extended to young people), comunidades de base was, in this case, able to
expose community psychology work to organised feminist politics (and the possi-
bilities therein) which are relatively autonomous from state intervention, thereby
conceiving social change beyond community psychology’s institutionalised scope.
The audience dialogue that emerged from the screening included numerous
divergent interpretations of the film, with ensuing debates around religiosity and
teenage pregnancy. It has, however, been retrospectively noted (see Malherbe and
Everitt-Penhale 2017) that a more diverse audience may have contributed to espe-
cially robust debate and discussion. Looking back, other resistance groups could
have been invited to the screening event (or perhaps other screenings) as a means of
diversifying the project’s political engagement, while ensuring the centrality of
youth voice. In this way, we may begin to build on the kind of comunidades de base
that was established through Free Gender.
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies Through… 91
Efforts to “liberate liberation” (Kurtiş and Adams 2015, p.389) must consider criti-
cally the manner by which justice is conceived, articulated and enacted. In this
chapter, we attempt to formulate praxes of decolonial feminist community psychol-
ogies that address and dismantle currents of coloniality which operate in much
mainstream feminism; speak to the colonial assumptions at play in malestream
community psychologies; and highlight, with a focus on decoloniality, the overlap-
ping concerns of feminisms and community psychologies. Community-centred
work that engages liberation in this manner is as messy, complex and fraught with
contradiction as it is necessary and overdue.
As a means of exploring some of the complexities of PAR, as framed by princi-
ples of decolonial feminist psychologies, this chapter draws on a community-
engaged project that saw a group of South African school-going learners work with
researchers and filmmakers to produce a participatory film on teenage pregnancy.
Throughout the film’s production, primary and secondary texts, participants engaged
in a process of coming-to-voice, where they ignored, subverted, challenged, remade
and (in)visiblised hegemonic knowledges and powers in a manner that signified
their enabling power.
In our analysis, we consider the participants’ attempts to collaboratively engage
with and (re)present patriarchy by focusing on teenage pregnancy in both the pro-
duction and primary texts, while undergoing a kind of conscientisation through
comunidades de base in the secondary text. As researchers, we engaged with reflex-
ivity – an important feature of decolonising praxes – in two ways: firstly, it was
acknowledged throughout that our own interpretation is but one of many on offer,
and is undoubtedly constrained and enabled by our particular institutional affilia-
tions and identity markers. Secondly, we acknowledge that throughout the project,
the facilitator (that is, this chapter’s third author – a white, middle-class, woman),
despite developing a long-term relationship with participants, possibly inhibited
their coming-to-voice by influencing this process (both wittingly and unwittingly)
in ways that (re)inscribed coloniality in certain ways, while, perhaps, also remained
inattentive to various subversive and participatory potentialities.
We do not outline comprehensively in this chapter the many ways by which com-
munity psychologists can, through PAR, bring their work into the orbit of decolo-
nising feminisms. Nor do we offer an assessment of such praxes – indeed, doing so
would negate the complexities and paradoxes inherent to this task. Rather, by exam-
92 N. Malherbe et al.
References
Arnfred, S., & Ampofo, A. A. (2010). Introduction: Feminist politics of knowledge. In S. Arnfred
& A. A. Ampofo (Eds.), African feminist politics of knowledge: Tensions, challenges, possibili-
ties (pp. 5–27). Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Cosgrove, L., & McHugh, M. C. (2000). Speaking for ourselves: Feminist methods and commu-
nity psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 28(6), 815–838.
Fals-Borda, O. (1985). Knowledge and people’s power: Lessons with peasants in Nicaragua,
Mexico, and Colombia. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.
Fiske, J. (1987). British cultural studies and television. In R. Allen (Ed.), Channels of discourse
reassembled: Television in contemporary criticism (pp. 284–326). North Carolina: University
of North Carolina Press.
Fryer, D., & Laing, A. (2008). Community psychologies: What are they? What could they be?
Why does it matter? A critical community psychology approach. Australian Community
Psychologist, 20(2), 7–15.
Gokani, R., & Walsh, R. T. (2017). On the historical and conceptual foundations of a community
psychology of social transformation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 59(3–4),
284–294.
Gordon, L. R. (2017). When justice is not enough: Toward the decolonization of normative life.
In F. F. Bragato & L. R. Gordon (Eds.), Geopolitics and decolonization: Perspectives from the
global South (pp. 31–48). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gqola, P. D. (2001). Ufanele uqavile: Blackwomen, feminisms and postcoloniality in Africa.
Agenda, 16(50), 11–22.
Gqola, P. D. (2010). What is slavery to me? Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Grey, S. (2004). Decolonising feminism: Aboriginal women and the global ‘Sisterhood’. Enweyin:
The Way We Speak, 8(1), 9–22.
Helman, R., Malherbe, N., & Kaminer, D. (2019). Young people’s reproductions of the ‘father as
provider’ discourse: Intersections of race, class, culture and gender within a liberal democracy.
Community, Work & Family, 22(2), 146–166.
hooks, B. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, B. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kurtiş, T., & Adams, G. (2015). Decolonizing liberation: Toward a transnational feminist psychol-
ogy. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3(1), 388–413.
Lewis, D. (2001). African feminisms. Agenda, 16(50), 4–10.
Engaging Praxes for Decolonial Feminist Community Psychologies Through… 93
Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1),
186–219.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759.
Lykes, M. B., & Coquillon, E. (2007). Participatory and action research and feminisms: Towards
transformative praxis. In S. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and
praxis (pp. 297–326). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Malherbe, N., & Everitt-Penhale, B. (2017). Exploring participant-led film-making as a
community-engaged method. In M. Seedat, S. Suffla, & D. J. Christie (Eds.), Emancipatory
and participatory methodologies in peace, critical, and community psychology (pp. 133–127).
Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Mekgwe, P. (2008). Theorizing African feminism(s): The ‘colonial’ question. Quest: An African
Journal of Philosophy, 20, 11–22.
Mitchell, C., & de Lange, M. (2011). Community-based participatory video and social action in
rural South Africa. In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research
methods (pp. 171–185). London: SAGE.
Moletsane, R., Mitchell, C., de Lange, N., Stuart, J., Buthelezi, T., & Taylor, M. (2009). What can
a woman do with a camera? Turning the female gaze on poverty and HIV and AIDS in rural
South Africa. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(3), 315–331.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2011). The logic of violence in Africa (Ferguson Centre for African and
Asian Studies No. 2). Milton Keynes: Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies.
Niesyto, H. (1992). Media work in rural areas. In B. Schorb (Ed.), Media education in Europe:
Towards a European culture of media (pp. 203–207). Munich: Livingstone.
Niesyto, H., Buckingham, D., & Fisherkeller, J. (2003). VideoCulture: Crossing borders with
young people’s video productions. Television & New Media, 4, 461–482.
Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodolog-
ical power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
16(2), 175–196.
Rappaport, J. (1977). Community psychology: Values, research, and action. California: Harcourt
School.
Reid, C., & Frisby, W. (2007). Continuing the journey: Articulating dimensions of feminist partici-
patory research. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of action research:
Participative inquiry and practice (pp. 93–105). London: SAGE Publications.
Rodríguez, L. F., & Brown, T. M. (2009). From voice to agency: Guiding principles for participa-
tory action research with youth. New Directions for Youth Development, 2009(123), 19–34.
Sánchez, P. (2009). Chicana feminist strategies in a participatory action research project with
transnational Latina youth. New Directions for Youth Development, 2009(123), 83–98.
Suffla, S., Kaminer, D., & Bawa, U. (2012). Photovoice as community engaged research: The
interplay between knowledge creation and agency in a South African study on safety promo-
tion. Journal of Psychology in Africa, 22(4), 517–526.
Walsh, C. E. (2015). Decolonial pedagogies walking and asking. Notes to Paulo Freire from
AbyaYala. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 34(1), 9–21.
Williamson, S. (2010). Resistance art in South Africa. Cape Town: Juta and Company Ltd..
Yen, J. (2008). A history of community psychology in South Africa. In C. van Ommen & D. Painter
(Eds.), Interiors: A history of psychology in South Africa (pp. 385–412). Cape Town: Unisa
Press.
Zavala, M. (2013). What do we mean by decolonizing research strategies? Lessons from decoloniz-
ing, indigenous research projects in New Zealand and Latin America. Indigeneity, Education
& Society, 2(1), 55–71.
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands
Identities: A Feminist, Decolonial
Approach
Lütfiye Ali
Contents
ace, Ethnics, Muslims and Muslim Women: Legacies of Colonialism in Australia
R 96
Voices of Muslim Women in Academic Literature 97
Decolonial Community Psychology 98
Theorising Muslim Women: A Decolonial Feminist Approach 99
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands Identities 101
Performing Islam: Constructing Binaries Between Muslim And Non-Muslims 102
Good (Muslim) Women and Other Women 104
Gendered Boundaries: Resisting Assimilation and Colonial Power 106
Conclusion 106
References 107
In her play, At Her Feet, Nadia Davids asks: “Why are Muslim women not given the
space to air their doubts and beliefs?” (Davids 2006, p. 67). In exploring the
intersections of race, ethnicity, politics and religion in the lives of Muslim women
in the South African and global context, Davids explains that the gendered challenges
faced by women who occupy this subject position are ‘subsumed’ by racial ones.
She explains that challenges arising from their gendered identity are all too often
processed in private thoughts or within the boundaries of ‘safe relationships’.
Davids, similar to feminist Muslim scholars in Canada (Zine 2008) and Australia
(Hussein 2010), explains that Muslim women are often rendered invisible or are
silenced by voices that speak for ‘us’, at ‘us’ and to ‘us’. I have also experienced this
(self)silencing in my work, exploring the diverse identities of Muslim women in the
Australian context.
My (self)silencing became evident to me when, in reflecting on my work and my
history, I realised I was not fully attending to the multiple sources of oppression and
power informing Muslim women’s subjectivities. I was cautious of bringing to light
the gendered experiences of oppression in a context where the vilification of
L. Ali (*)
Digital Ethnography Research Centre RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
Race and racism have been, and continue to be central to the nation building of
Australia (Hage 2000; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Australia has a long history of
racial discrimination beginning with white colonial ‘settlement’ in the eighteenth
century, the Australian Federation in 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act and the
implementation of racially discriminatory policies which privileged the ‘white
race’, and which constituted what is better known as the ‘White Australia Policy’
(Cleland 2001). This history formed the premise for a white Australia nationalism
which centred around Anglo Celtic identity whilst implementing an assimilationist
approach to integrating non-Anglo Celtic migrants into Australian society (Hage
2000). In 1973, the White Australia Policy was officially replaced with the national
policy of Multiculturalism.
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands Identities: A Feminist, Decolonial Approach 97
In multicultural Australia, while ‘diverse ethnic groups’ are supported and have
the right to practice their cultural and religious beliefs, legacies of colonialism
continue to operate. Colonial discourses of racial privilege operate through processes
of Othering and not necessarily through overt forms of rejection and exclusion (Ali
and Sonn 2009). The ethnic identity position in Australia embraces migrants and
subsequent generations who are of ‘different’ racial, cultural, and religious
backgrounds to Anglo Saxon-Celtic Australians who occupy a privileged, dominant
and normative position (Ali and Sonn 2009; Hage 2000). Following the global
events of September 11 and the Bali and London bombings (Ho 2007; Yasmeen
2007) at the turn of the twenty-first century, colonial discourses of difference, which
emphasised racial difference in terms of ethnicity, began to be mapped onto Muslim
identities. While this heightened visibility and discriminatory practices occur as a
result of the current global climate; the Othering and the negative portrayal and
exclusion of Muslims have a long history in Australia (Brasted 2001), and are
deeply seated in historical colonial practices and representations of Muslims (Said
1979).
Contemporary colonial discourses in media and political arenas construct Islam
as a religion of terror and violence (Casimiro et al. 2007), a backward belief system
that is incompatible with, and that poses a threat to ‘Australian values’ (Yasmeen
2007). Despite their diversity, and the history of Muslims in Australia, Muslims
have been homogenised and stigmatised as the unassimilable Other (Ali and Sonn
2009, 2017; Casimiro, et al. 2007; Yasmeen 2007). Physical expressions of religious
identity such as the hijab, beard, or other clothing are associated with signs of
religious fundamentalism, radicalism, threat and ‘cultural backwardness’ (Zine
2006).
Colonial representation of Muslim women in Australia, as elsewhere, are
homogenised and reduced to the veil (Akbarzadeh 2010; Hussein 2007, 2010;
Yasmeen 2007). Although the veil cannot be read as a singular signifier of Muslim
women’s identities, it has been understood to signify an authentic Muslim identity,
often leaving those who do not veil on the margins of this social category
(Akbarzadeh 2010; Hussein 2010). The veil signifies both patriarchal oppression of
Islamic tradition whilst being positioned as a powerful signifier of the existence and
prevalence of Islam. Additionally, these colonial discourses have been used to
express ‘concerns’ for the status of Muslim women and to form the basis for
‘paternalistic and anti-Muslim nationalism’ arguments in Australia (Ho 2007,
p. 290) and globally (Abu-Lughod 2013; Fernandez 2009).
Given the current socio-historical and political context, scholars have increasingly
focused on the experiences and the identities of Muslim women. The scant research
within the field of psychology has often treated the identities of Muslim women as
fixed, singular and given. There is also a growing body of work exploring the
98 L. Ali
Research within the field of community psychology in Australia has attended to the
challenges faced by communities that have been racially marginalised. Historically,
approaches to culture and identity among immigrant communities in Australian
community psychology have been influenced by Eurocentric epistemologies
(Gridley et al. 2007), such as the concept of a psychological sense of community
and acculturation theory, which were further developed and interpreted in the
Australian context (Pretty et al. 2007). Such theories developed from a Eurocentric
epistemological standpoint are not neutral and objective but rather stem from and
privilege the worldview and serve the interest of those to who speak it (Grosfugal
2009). In recent years, there has been a ‘decolonial turn’, which is marked by the
epistemic shift on identity and culture among racially marginalised communities, in
the field of community psychology (Reyes Cruz and Sonn 2011) and psychology
more broadly (Bhatia 2018; Bhatia and Ram 2001; Okazaki et al. 2008).
Scholars have challenged Eurocentric models by making explicit how race and
colonialism operate in epistemologies used to explore the lives of communities that
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands Identities: A Feminist, Decolonial Approach 99
are racially Othered. Scholars have reconceptualised identity as not fixed nor a
singular outcome of mental processes and work has illustrated how identity is
informed by social political conditions within which communities negotiate and
navigate identities. They have argued for the importance of the social, historical,
and political context and discourses to understand the ways culture is negotiated
(Bhatia 2007; Bhatia and Ram 2001; Glover et al. 2010; Hodgetts et al. 2010;
Okazaki, et al. 2008; Reyes Cruz and Sonn 2011). It has brought to light the ways
in which colonial power operates as an unmarked and normative organising system
through the concept of whiteness (Ali and Sonn 2009; Green et al. 2007). Post
colonial, decolonial, liberation and critical social theory have been used as epistemic
frameworks along with methodological approaches to recover and bring to focus the
experiences and voices of marginalised communities whilst critically attending to
social relations of power in the broader socio-historical and political context (for
example Ali and Sonn 2009, 2010; Sonn 2012; Sonn and Lewis 2009). It has
contributed to community psychology by highlighting the way the colonial past
continues to influence identity and culture (Reyes Cruz and Sonn 2011). Its focus on
developing ways of knowing and knowledge that reflect and promote the interests
of racially marginalised people has enabled community psychology to work towards
its commitment for social justice.
Whilst decolonial approaches in community psychology enabled me to under-
stand and to decolonise my own thinking and bring to consciousness the ways race
and racism has been informed and shaped by subjectivity and communities that
have been racially marginalised, it does not adequately theorise or address the ways
in which gender intersects in these processes. Developments in decolonial thinking
in the field of community psychology does not allow for centring the ways Muslim
women living in Australia negotiate their identities across intersecting relations of
colonial, Islamists and patriarchal power.
In her book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza” (2007), Anzaldúa navi-
gates complex relations of power arising from the nexus between culture, patriar-
chy, sexuality, race and colonialism in the lives of women. She draws on her own
experiences and social location and revisits not only her own history but the history
of her people to understand the ways in which history has shaped the material real-
ity of Chicana women. Central to her theory of identity is social location and an
appreciation of historical, social and material processes as fundamental to shaping
the subjectivity of people. It is rooted in the broader history of racial and ethnic
forms of oppression whilst recognising the importance of challenging the patriarchal
forms of oppression in one’s culture, in her case, Mexican culture. Anzaldúa
challenges Eurocentric epistemological assumptions of ‘disembodied objective
knowledge’. She theorises from the flesh by privileging her voice, her epistemological
position arising from her multiple positionalities. Anzaldúa argues that it is “...only
through the body, through the pulling of the flesh, can the human soul be transformed.
And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise
from the human body...” (2007, p. 97). This quote highlights the challenges and
importance of developing knowledge that emerges from the worldview of those
whom it aims to serve. It calls for the centering of voices, in this case the voices of
Muslim women, that have been silenced and subjected to epistemic injustices due to
Eurocentric epistemologies that give way and force a “consciousness of duality”
(Anzaldúa 2007, p. 59).
Anzaldúa (2007) concept of the Borderlands refers to the physical border
between the U.S and Mexico as well as a psychosocial border arising from her
multiple positionalities. Borderlands theory captures the complexity of identity
making at the borders where binary and mutually exclusive identities meet and
intersect. Anzaldúa’s theory on Borderlands identity synthesises binary and
oppositional social identities. Anzaldúa explains that the Borderlands is the psychic
and social terrain of people who, as a result of occupying multiple social spaces, live
in between different worlds. Anzaldúa (2007) recognises the self as shaped by
discourses and material reality whilst recognising the agency of individuals in
everyday life. To do this, Anzaldúa develops her conceptualisation of “a new mestiza
consciousness” (2007, p. 99). This new subjectivity is embedded in contradictions
and ambiguity and emerges and develops as a result of, and in resistance to binary
understandings about identity. The mestiza consciousness operates in the
Borderlands, the physical and psychosocial space where contradictions and
dichotomous categories meet and blend. Anzaldúa contends that the mestiza
consciousness is the result of “Racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross
pollinization” (2007, p. 99). Anzaldúa went on to say: “Because I, a mestiza,
continually walk out of one culture into another, because I am in all cultures at the
same time...” (2007, p. 99). Her reference and call for the recognition of the new
mestiza consciousness calls in to question the functions of boundaries and borders
created by western binary thinking that limits multiple forms of identification. In
doing so, Anzaldúa also challenges colonial understandings on hierarchal binary
thinking that have been used to know the colonised subject (Lugones 2010).
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands Identities: A Feminist, Decolonial Approach 101
In this section, I apply the work of Anzaldúa to explore complex multiple intersect-
ing relations informing the subjectivity of Australian Muslim women. Twenty
Muslim women were interviewed between 2008 and 2011. The women self-identi-
fied as being from; Cypriot Turkish, Turkish, Lebanese, Egyptian, Pakistani, Indian,
Somali, Ethiopian, Iraqi and Albanian backgrounds. Most of the women were
second generation Australians who are defined not only as migrant descendants who
were born in Australia, but also migrated to Australia around the preschool age of
five. Four of the women migrated to Australia during young adulthood. All the
women, irrespective of being migrant or second generation, had a university level
education which not only affords them social prestige within ethnic migrant
communities but also social capital and mobility (Ahmad 2001). Efforts were made
to recruit women who did not wear the veil and also from non-religious spaces, as
past research on Muslim women has focused on women who veil and privileged
Muslim women’s religious identity. Over half of the women were married, four
were single, one had a boyfriend and four were divorced. Conversational interviewing
was used to explore the women’s understandings and experiences. The interviews
took place at a location chosen by the women and the duration of the interviews
varied between one and three hours.
To foreground the women’s negotiations of identity and culture across multiple
relations of power the ‘Power and Subjectivity’ approach developed by Parker
(1992) was drawn on. Departing from traditional understandings of truth and
knowledge, language is not considered as a mere tool to convey knowledge but
102 L. Ali
Akin to the mestiza consciousness, the women constructed Islam in ways that
intersect with multiple identity locations. Highlighting multiplicity emerging from
the intersections between Islam and ethnicity enabled women to resist binaries and
hegemonic versions of Islam:
We were what you would call culturally Muslim. Uhm, so we weren’t religious to a point
where we were it defined us but it was part of our overall culture. So, a part of your
socialisation. So we pray and fasted. We did all that sort of stuff. I think the average Indian
Muslim is pretty much like that. Like don’t really wear the veil or don’t really that sort of
thing. I think your average Indian is not so Muslim or not so practicing is because they have
grown up with Hindus and other communities and other religions specifically. (Ajda)
Many women who did not veil explained resistance to the veil as a marker of their
Muslim identity. Ebru, who veiled according to context as a result of community
expectations, commented that her understanding of veiling intersects with sect.
Ebru, drawing in her intersecting thinking, challenges Islamist patriarchal
interpretations which place emphasis on the veil:
Women have their own identity and it is not fair for women to be forced into something you
are not or don’t want to be. Islam gives equal rights. Women can think but why is someone
else thinking for them. So if they are created in a way they can think then it should be
respected. They don’t respect women’s ability to think. They interpret it the way they want
to. They think it is right... but in Islam there are 72 communities. The Ismaili community that
I belong to has Muslims. (Ebru)
The women emphasised and offered ‘inner’ dimension of being Muslim to counter
Islamist definitions of Islam that mandate ‘doing’ Islam to construct binaries
between Muslims and non-Muslims. While the doing aspect of Islam was a powerful
discourse, the feeling Muslim discourse was also strong. As Verkuyten and de Wolf
(2002) explain, ‘feeling discourse’ cannot be opened to the same critique as ‘doing’
discourse. Feeling discourse functioned as a form of resistance to hegemonic
understandings of Islam, whilst claiming a discursive space for diverse expressions
of Muslim identity. Thinking and feeling Muslim were interlinked in the sense that
feeling was related to worldview, a framework which helped women make sense of
events and situations, as demonstrated in the excerpt below:
Allah gives good to the good. I truly believe that. I have seen it throughout life too many
times not to be true. That is why I said there is more to religion to me than just the physical
image and it doesn’t matter how they portray the religion to me it has a total way... I believe
that is the way it was instilled into me, not visible at all. (Amina)
In the excerpt below, Ajda explains despite contradicting and challenging norms
and expectations, she is comfortable with ambiguity. Akin to the mestiza
consciousness, her subjectivity is embedded in contradictions and ambiguity, which
she turns into something else. She unites all the ambivalence and contradictions by
recognising it as a place in its own right:
I also believe that each person’s faith is to their own. And yes, I am not Muslim in the way
I should be to my father for example. I don’t wear the hijab. I don’t cover myself completely.
My husband is Aussie uhm. We are not right. But I am very comfortable with the person I
am and I identify with it. (Ajda)
104 L. Ali
For me, I guess I am a pluralist. That’s not how a lot of Muslims would define their prac-
tice...So someone that says “look my religion is right where as a pluralist will say we all see
the sun but from different angles. So therefore, I will respect that you see the sun as well. So,
I use reasoning as opposed to blind faith…Some people when they want to tell you and
preach to you that you are not practicing proper Islam. They focus on the hijab more. It is
an obsession. (Nevin)
Synthesising binaries and contradictions is not an easy task and may, as suggested
by Anzaldúa (2007), result in the “swamping of (one’s) psychological borders”
(p. 101). Dilara appears to hold ideas and concepts relating to her identities in rigid
boundaries. She begins by explaining that being Muslim is an internal dimension of
her identity; however, she follows with ambiguity:
My faith is here (pointing to her heart). I believe in Allah in here. I don’t have to look dif-
ferent or show it. Insanin içi temiz olsun (meaning to have good intentions). As long as you
are clean inside. My dad used to hate that. If you don’t do namaz (pray). If you don’t do
oruç (fast), if you don’t do zekat (give to charity); what is the use. Içi temiz (good intentions),
what is the big deal everyone’s inside is clean. You have to do these to be a Musluman
(Muslim). And maybe he’s right and maybe I am not Musluman because I am not doing all
those things so I feel like. (Dilara)
She is told that internal dimensions, such as believing in Allah or having “a clean
heart” does not make a person different to other non-Muslims and can be undermined
by ‘lovers of purity’ (Lugones 1994), in this case the mosque culture and her father.
‘Lovers of purity’ suggest that you need to show, practice and demonstrate Muslim
identity in order to be different to non-Muslims. Dilara, despite her efforts at
transforming ambiguity, concludes that “maybe she is not a Muslim”. She seems to
display what Anzaldúa describes as feeling cultureless and as experiencing
psychological unrest.
There are Catholics and Christians that don’t do it...it is against their religion too but they
are not religiously focused. With us, when we are being brought up, religion and culture
come together as the bringing up at home from our parents. For them they don’t even have
a culture let alone have a religion and practice a religion, it is different. So if they are more
conservative about sleeping around then it is because them as an individual and personality.
(Ruby)
The excerpts below demonstrate that the previously discussed discourse of differ-
ences between good ‘ethnic’ Muslim women and Other women, are closely related
to processes around identity making in a social context where communities are mar-
ginalised and Othered. As evident in the previous section, these binary differences
informing women’s subjectivities were not always easy to transgress as they func-
tion to preserve cultural and religious identity and functioned as strategies of resis-
tance to assimilation and the uncontested hegemonic colonial discourses and
domination. In response to racism and colonial discourses, Muslim women are
positioned as markers of ethnic as well as Muslim identity. Maintaining ethnic
identity is heavily embedded in women’s bodies, behaviour and particularly
sexuality as they are symbolic carriers and transmitters of ethnic and religious
identity (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005; Anzaldúa 2007):
They have come from there and they have sort of stopped in a time zone. They try to hold on
and say “No, no you are an Arab, you are not supposed to do this and that, they (Australian
women) are different they can do whatever they want but you can’t”. They try to hold it
together like they are too scared and don’t want to let go. Once that is gone that is it. So,
they always want to remind, you, “Remember where you come from, this is how we are, we
are different”, they make you realise you are different and you are not the same. (Ayşe)
Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler (2002) contend that women ‘embody borders and
boundaries’ that they also transgress. Transgressing is associated with being
“Aussie”. Leila, who demonstrated conscious awareness of not conforming to
hierarchal binary categories, explains that she found herself being positioned as
being in the process of ‘becoming Australian’ as she did not adhere to social ideals
on hetero-sexuality. Although homosexual relationships are prevalent among
Muslims, in Muslim societies they are often constructed as “un-Islamic”, “western”
and “modern” (Ali 2006, p. 29). Leila finds herself in a position where she must
overtly perform and engage with the signifiers of culture such as religious
celebrations and language:
My partner and I are conscious about visiting people for bayram (Eid) because it is almost
contradicting their own expectations like thinking “Oh yeah, now look they have become
Australianised and you know she is not going to be the same now that she has come out”.
So we deliberately try to challenge their conceptions about who we have become by being
the same people. (Leyla)
Conclusion
power and the broader historical and political context within which Muslim women
negotiate their subjectivity. The findings demonstrate that the identities of Muslim
women emerge at the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity and Islam as they
grapple with various binaries and borders. Muslim women’s identities are embedded
in historical global power relations, and struggles over difference and identity
whereby the gendered identity and bodies of Muslim women become a platform for
ethnic Muslim communities to resist colonial power. The identities of Muslim are
informed by Islamist and colonial structures of power which are both underpinned
by competing versions of hetero patriarchy. Binary constructions of difference
interpellate women, prompting them to negotiate their identity within narrow
parameters. While women were able to challenge binaries and borders and negotiate
the complexity and ambiguity arising from their intersecting social locations, other
times some women negotiated their identities in ways that reinscribe these binaries.
This paper makes an important contribution to the decolonial turn in community
psychology. While the decolonial turn in community psychology recognises that
colonial forms of power operate as a racial construct which intersects with other
discursively constructed social identities that take shape according to the socio-
historical and political context (Green, et al. 2007), it has not adequately explored
nor theorised these intersections resulting in the privileging of race and limiting the
ways the discipline can attend to the communities it aims to serve. Borderlands
theory, with its emphasis on intersections of multiple identity locations in light of
asymmetrical social power relations, allows community psychology to deepen its
understanding of how complex relations of power manifest and are contested by
marginalised communities. It enables community psychology to centre experiences
of people by attending to the multiple and diverse ways socio-political conditions
marginalise people, which are all essential in community psychology constructing
meaningful knowledge that is necessary for social transformation. Its focus on
intersecting relations of power enables us to reclaim the voices which have been
silenced by western binary thinking that instead has permeated community
psychology. It offers community psychology an epistemological framework to
move beyond borders and work towards social justice.
References
Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ahmad, F. (2001). Modern traditions? British Muslim women and academic achievement. Gender
and Education, 13(2), 137–152.
Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam: Historical roots of a modern debate. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Ahmed, L. (2011). A quiet revolution: The Veil’s resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
London: Yale University Press.
Akbarzadeh, S. (2010). The challenge of being Muslim. In S. Akbarzadeh (Ed.), Challenging iden-
tities: Muslim women in Australia (pp. 1–8). Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Alarcon, N. (1990). Chicana feminism: In the tracks of ‘the’ native woman. Cultural Studies, 4(3),
248–256.
108 L. Ali
Ali, K. (2006). Sexual ethics and Islam: Feminist reflections on Qur’an, hadith and jurisprudence.
Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Ali, L., & Sonn, C. C. (2009). Multiculturalism and whiteness: Through the experiences of second
generation Cypriot Turkish. Australian Community Psychologist, 21(1), 24–38.
Ali, L., & Sonn, C. C. (2010). Constructing identity as a second generation Cypriot Turkish in
Australia: The multi hyphenated other. Culture and Psychology, 16(3), 416–436.
Ali, L., & Sonn, C. C. (2017). Strategies of resistance to anti-Islamic representations among
Australian Muslim women: An intersectional approach. International Journal of Inclusive
Education, 21(11), 1167–1181.
Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (2005). Racialized boundaries: Race, nation, gender, colour &
class and the anti-racist struggle. London: Routledge
Anzaldúa, G. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books.
Baker, A., Quayle, A., & Ali, L. (2018). Reflexivities of discomfort: Unsettling subjectivities in
and through research in N. Oke, C. C. Sonn, and A. Baker (2018). Interdisciplinary perspec-
tives on identities change and resistance. Amsterdam: Brill I Sense.
Bhatia, S. (2007). Rethinking culture and identity in psychology: Towards a transnational cultural
psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 27-28(2–1), 301–321.
Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology: Globalization, social justice, and Indian youth identi-
ties. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bhatia, S., & Ram, A. (2001). Rethinking ‘acculturation’ in relation to diasporic cultures and post-
colonial identities. Human Development, 44(1), 1–18.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London: Routledge.
Brah, A. (2007). Non-binarized identities of similarity and difference. In M. Wetherell,
M. Lafleche, & R. Berkeley (Eds.), Identity, ethnic diversity and community cohesion (pp. 137–
145). London: SAGE Publications.
Brasted, H. V. (2001). Contested representation in historical perspective: Images of Islam and
the Australian press 1950-2000. In A. Saeed & Akbarzadeh (Eds.), Muslim communities in
Australia (pp. 206–227). Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Casimiro, S., Hancock, P., & Northcote, J. (2007). Isolation and insecurity: Resettlement issues
among Muslim refugee women in Perth, Western Australia. Australian Journal of Social
Issues, 42(1), 55–69.
Cleland, B. (2001). The history of Muslims in Australia. In A. Saeed & S. Akbarzadeh (Eds.),
Muslim communities in Australia (pp. 12–32). Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Collins, P. H. (1998). It’s all in the family: Intersections of gender, race and nation. Hypatia, 13(3),
62–82.
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of
empowerment (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Conrad, B. K. (2006). Neo-institutionalism, social movements, and the cultural reproduction
of a Mentalite: Promise keepers reconstruct the Madonna/whore complex. The Sociological
Quarterly, 47, 305–331.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against
women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Davids, N. (2006). At her/ feet: A play in one act. Cape Town: Ohsun.
Fábos, A. (2012). Resisting blackness, embracing rightness: How Muslim Arab Sudanese women
negotiate their identity in the diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(2), 218–237.
Fadil, N. (2011). Not−/unveiling as an ethical practice. Feminist Review, 98, 83–109.
Farahani, F. (2007). Diasporic narratives on virginity. In H. Moghissi (Ed.), Muslim diaspora:
Gender, culture and identity (pp. 186–204). Hoboken: Routledge.
Fernandez, S. (2009). The crusade over the bodies of women. Patterns of Prejudice, 43(3–4),
269–286.
Glover, M., Dudgeon, P., & Huygens, I. (2010). Colonialism and racism. In G. Nelson &
I. Prilleltensky (Eds.), Community psychology: In pursuit of liberation and Well-being (2nd
ed., pp. 389–406). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Australian Muslim Women’s Borderlands Identities: A Feminist, Decolonial Approach 109
Green, M. J., Sonn, C. C., & Matsebula, J. (2007). Reviewing whiteness: Theory, research and
possibilities. South African Journal, 37(3), 389–419.
Gridley, H., Fisher, A. T., Thomas, D. R., & Bishop, B. (2007). Development of community psy-
chology in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Australian Psychologist, 42(1), 15–22.
Grosfugal, R. (2009). Epistemologies of transformation: The Latin American Decolonial option
and its ramifications (Vol. 6, 10038). Kult.
Hage, G. (2000). White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. New York:
Routledge.
Ho, C. (2007). Muslim women’s new defenders: Women’s rights, nationalism and islamaphobia in
contemporary Australia. Women’s Studies International Forum, 30(4), 290–298.
Hodgetts, D., Drew, N., Sonn, C., Stolte, O., Nikora, L. W., & Curtis, C. (2010). Social psychology
and everyday life. Basingstoke. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hooks, B. (1981). Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Hooks, B. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. South End Press: Boston.
Hussein, S. (2007). The limits of force/choice discourses in discussion Muslim women’s dress
codes. Transforming Cultures eJournal, 2(1), 1–15.
Hussein, S. (2010). Double bind and double responsibility: Speech and silence among Australian
Muslim women. In S. Akbarzadeh (Ed.), Challenging Identities: Muslim Women in Australia
(pp. 159–173). Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing.
Imtoual, A. (2007). ‘Is being Australian about being white?’ Australian whiteness, national iden-
tity & Muslim women. In D. Riggs (Ed.), Taking up the Challenge: Critical Race & Whiteness
Studies in a Postcolonising Nation (pp. 190–206). Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing.
Khan, S. (2002). Aversion and desire: Negotiating Muslim female identity in the diaspora. Ontario:
Women’s Press.
Lorasdagi, B. K. (2009). The headscarf and emancipation in the Netherlands. Feminism and
Psychology, 19(3), 328–334.
Lugones, M. (1994). Purity, impurity and separation. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 19(2), 458–479.
Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorising coalition against multiple oppressions.
Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x.
Mendoza, B. (2015). Coloniality of gender and power: From postcoloniality to decoloniality.
In L. Disch & M. Hawkesworth (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of feminist theory. Oxford
Handbooks Online. dio. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.6.
Mernissi, F. (1987). Beyond the veil: Male-female dynamics in modern Muslim society. Indiana:
Indiana University Press.
Minh-Ha, T. (1992). Framer Framed. London: Routledge.
Mishra, S., & Shirazi, F. (2010). Hybrid identities: American Muslim women speak. Gender, Place
and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 17(2), 191–209.
Mirza, S. (2013). ‘A second skin’: Embodied intersectionality, transnationalism and narratives
of identity and belonging among Muslim women in Britain. Women’s Studies International
Forum, 36, 5–15.
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist
Review, 30, 61–88.
Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (1981). Introduction. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This bridge
called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Watertown: Persephone Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). Talkin’ up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism.
Queensland: Queensland University Press.
Nader, L. (1989). Orientalism, Occidentalism and the control of women. Cultural Dynamics, 2,
323–355.
Okazaki, S., David, E. J., & Abelmann, N. (2008). Colonialism and psychology of cul-
ture. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(1), 90–106. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00046.x.
110 L. Ali
Haile Matutu
Contents
Introduction 111
Positioning Queer Subjects as Community 113
Regulatory, Principilist Ethics Vs Dialogical, Value-Based Ethics 115
Navigating Ethical Quagmires 118
Reaching & Engaging NGI MSM: An Ethics of Care 118
Reconsidering Consent 120
Rapport & Conflict of Interests 121
Imagining Risk and Vulnerability 125
Humanising the Research Encounter: A Decolonial Feminist Approach 126
References 126
Introduction
H. Matutu (*)
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
came to experience how received knowledge, in the form of ‘standard research eth-
ics practice’, functions as epistemic violence when applied as universals in contexts
other those from which they originate. That is, what emerged in the study illustrated
the limitations of regulatory forms of ethics, given their finite sensitivity to contex-
tual issues. This study on the constructions of gender and sexual identity among
non-gay identifying men who have sex with men used non-probability, purposive
sampling to recruit 10 adult participants. Half of whom were recruited from an
online location based social network application: Grindr, one of the most popular
social networks for gay, bi, trans, and queer people.
While this project started out with a focus on finding a way to do psychological
research in ways that are not oppressive, the way I imagined what oppression might
look like reflected my thinking about oppression as something external to myself.
That is, I could not fathom that, I as a queer Black man could be the source of
oppression towards people with dissident sexual practices and/or marginal sexuali-
ties. At the inception of this study, I conceived of oppression as originating from a
place of uncaring forceful usurping of another person’s power. With little reflexion,
I took my knowledge of the challenges of being in the world as Black and queer to
be a suitable basis for building a bridge that would connect me and the people who
would take part in this study. However, I was gravely mistaken in assuming that this
‘shared’ experience would be sufficient, so too in my thinking that my methods,
because they were marked with institutional approval, would naturally be void of
oppressive tendencies. What emerged was that my sense of ‘good conduct’ was
experienced by potential participants as an attempt to either convert or force them to
give an account of themselves for being non-normative. The very attempt to
‘research’ NGI MSM was considered by the men as part of an effort to ‘normalise
them’. That is, an attempt to shame them as people “whose sexuality and desire do
not have the conjugal home as their (primary) venue, whose lives are considered
less real or less legitimate” (Butler as cited in Ruti 2017, p. 13). Over the course of
the study my application of ethics emerged as discordant with the perspective of a
‘regulatory enterprise’ but was rather intrinsically aligned to reflexivity. In the early
parts of the study, some men who refused to participate assumed that I was after
narratives of pain and suffering brought on by their refusal to take on the yoke of
identity. Seen from this vantage point, my intentions were not enough to justify
what seemed to be a colonialization of their knowledge of themselves. My experi-
ence of recruiting men for this study led me to consider that ethical conduct in com-
munity research with marginalized populations can be more useful and affirming
when it is ongoing, critical, and dialogical (Cannella and Manuelito 2008; Figueroa
2014). It further necessitated an approach that would allow for an epistemological
openness and one that fosters relationality and authentic rapport. Through this work
I came to embrace a decolonial feminist research agenda, seeing it as an opportunity
to reconsider the practice of ethics in research and attend to the unjust erasure of
dissidence from community psychological research. From this vantage point, the
study worked against the affinity between research and epistemic violence.1
The term MSM is widely used in public health discourse and has been found to be useful in con-
1
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 113
The study I draw from to map out the lessons we can learn for thinking about and
developing a decolonial feminist psychology was not designed to be feminist nor
decolonial, per se. My choice in these approaches emerged as a result of the limita-
tions of mainstream ethical frameworks to engage with the participants in a manner
that I could recognise as ethical and non-oppressive. At first, I approached this task
only with the guidance of the ethical frameworks that are made available for stu-
dents of psychology in most university settings: research ethics guidelines and the
professional codes of conduct that regulate the discipline. In the sections that fol-
low, I first discuss and critique how non-gay-identifying subjects, who refuse iden-
tity come to be considered as community; and some of the discordance that may be
associated with this framing. I follow this discussion by highlighting some of the
salient ethical concerns that emerged within in this study. I explore institutionalised
regimes of ethics and the latent power wielded by institutional review boards and
their effect on the conduct of community psychological research. The chapter con-
cludes with a few examples of the ethical quagmires that I encountered in the course
of conducting this research, and points to the utility of feminist decolonial
approaches as means to humanise the research encounter (see Paris and Winn 2014)
both for participants and those who conduct community psychological research.
“The ideal of community presumes subjects who are present to themselves and presumes
subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves. It thus denies the dif-
ference between subjects” (Young 2004, p. 195).
One of the initial challenges I had in conceptualising this study related to how I
would come to delineate the men who would be participants: could they be consid-
ered a community, given that they mostly eschew any form of identity related to
their relations with men with whom they have sexual relations? Or were they merely
individuals who happened to share an affinity to engage in sexual relations with
other men? While most men in the study spoke of living as loners, where their same
sex desires were concerned, all of them spoke of the efforts they went to in order to
build or fashion forms of ‘community’. For some these were family members who
were sympathetic to difference, for others this was in the form of friendships with
other non-normative men. The virtual space of social network applications was
another productive source of a sense of community for some of the participants. It
should be noted that this view of these online platforms exists in spite of all com-
munication occurring between two individuals at a time. Mark, for example, spoke
about Grindr as a space of refuge, albeit with increasing heteronormativity:
texts where interventions aimed at sexual minorities may not be permitted if men took up identity
labels such as gay, bisexual etc. The term is also problematic in its apparent reduction of sexuality
to ‘acts’, and no less for its possible denial of sexual-minority groups’ right to name themselves.
114 H. Matutu
the queer community… at least the way I see it, it’s supposed to be a community that is
accepting, no matter what degree of queer you’ve experienced… you’re meant to know
what it’s like. So, this should be like a safe haven… the queer community, you know… this
is where you go when you know that you’re not straight or identify or when you don’t iden-
tify as straight! Why do you need the same utility? Like… to navigate this space? You
know… because you don’t need to hide from anyone here. But then again, I think it has to
do with the whole thing of like… we’ve also adopted heteronormativity…
ality research that situates itself squarely within community psychology. A cursory
search on major Psychology databases shows very little psychological research that
owns up to being simultaneously concerned with sexual subjectivity and commu-
nity psychology. Exceptions to this being research that addresses the intersections
of sexuality with health-related issues and their impact on community wellbeing
such as HIV research (see for example, D’Augelli 2000). This gives the impression
that community psychologists do not research sexual subjectivities unless they are
“community projects”- conceptualised in the terrestrial perspective outlined above.
There has been little engagement with the discordance between the seemingly con-
flicting ontological foundations of both community psychologies and the quintes-
sentially individuating mainstream Psychologies. We can discern from these
tendencies that there is a generalised fear of descending into the murky waters of
individualising experiences that community psychology has worked against since
its emergence. However, our reluctance to engage the personal – even as we embrace
ecological and systematic approaches to psychological inquiry – comes off as dis-
honesty; especially since it renders sexuality as exceptional. When the personal
(here one might read sexuality) is perceived as exceptional, above all other social
activities, it gets imbued with an inherent sense of danger (Webber and Brunger
2018). Again, this has tangible repercussions when we consider our approach to
research ethics when working with people situated/situating themselves at the mar-
gins. Given the problematics presented above, how might researchers minimise the
seemingly inadvertent harms that may be created through the way sexuality research
is framed both in practice as well as in the resulting reporting of the same? The next
section offers some possible approaches. I offer these as possibilities that yield very
different results.
While ethical frameworks offer criteria against which researchers might consider
what actions are morally justifiable in the conduct of research (Wiles 2013); these
frameworks may, at best, be considered idealised ethical guides, and vary according
to a researcher’s professional and disciplinary affiliation as well as their politics. de
Laine (2000) offers a useful definition of ethical dilemmas; she holds that they are
problems “for which no course of action exists because there are ‘good’ but contra-
dictory ethical reasons to take conflicting and incompatible courses of action” (p. 3).
There is little agreement among scholars about the nature of these dilemmas. Wiles
(2013) contends that even though ethical dilemmas may be situational and contex-
tual, the consideration of ethical frameworks does not preclude individual delibera-
tion on the part of researchers. She argues that the dilemmas that emerge in the field
are essentially moral dilemmas. Other scholars such as Hammersley and Traianou
(2012) have suggested that research ethics should be viewed as a type of
116 H. Matutu
occupational ethics. They forward an argument for a decentring of politics from the
research process by claiming that while ‘the political’ might be a motive for the
conduct of research, it should not be a substitute for its institutionalised goal. The
perception here is that ‘motives’ – as they refer to them, be they social justice, or
empowerment – should never be the goals of research. For them, the centring of
politics as the goal of research is only likely to increase the danger of error in find-
ings (ibid.). This view is of course discordant with any form of an emancipatory
research undertaking. Contrary to the position taken in professional ethics codes
and guidelines, where ethical dilemmas are viewed through the prism of objectivity
and from an intellectual distance, researchers in community psychological research
experience these dilemmas with an immediacy heightened by personal involvement
drawn from intuition, empathy and feelings (de Laine 2000).
Institutional Research Boards (IRB),2 Research Ethics Committees (REC), and
the professional codes of organisations such as the Health Professions Council of
South Africa (HPCSA), favour a regulatory form of ethics to guide community psy-
chological research (see von Unger 2016). The principlist approach to ethics is the
most widely used approach in the evaluation of applications for ethical clearance by
RECs (Wiles 2013). The regulatory orientation towards research ethics focuses on
the punitive mechanisms written within the various codes or standards should a
researcher fail to meet those standards or common rules. Many of the principles
addressed in professional codes largely relate to concerns about the wellbeing and
rights of research participants. Given that many researchers who conduct research
may not belong to professional organisations, ethics regulatory bodies, in the form
of RECs and IRBs, are often the sole means of ensuring researcher compliance with
some form of ethical framework. While these bodies may have an influence in deter-
mining how ethical issues will be handled before research projects commence,
researchers generally do not seek the guidance of these structures once they are in
the process of conducting research (Wiles 2013). The codes and standards of RECs’
framing of ethics are largely concerned with three ethical principles, which are
viewed as universal across all cultures: respect for personal autonomy, beneficence,
and justice (Mutenherwa and Wassenaar 2014). Where autonomy refers to the
inalienable right to the respect and dignity of research participants; beneficence
relates to the ways in which research participants might benefit from participating
in research, and the cardinal issue of research: participants being given enough
information to make informed choices about the risk and benefits of participation;
and justice being the degree to which participants are treated with fairness and
equity throughout the research process (Munro 2011; van Wijk and Harrison 2013).
The universality of these principles has been questioned (see for example,
Macklin 1999; Redwood and Todres 2006); the argument here being that these prin-
2
Institutional Review Boards (IRB), Ethics Review Boards ERB), Ethics Review Committees
(ERC), and Research Ethics Committees (REC) are all terms that refer to groups of suitably quali-
fied persons who have a mandated institutional or national authority to review and approve research
involving human participants (Kruger and Horn 2014). In this chapter I shall use the REC to refer
to all these groups as that term is the most frequently used in South African institutions.
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 117
ciples rely on Western notions of ethics and that ethical issues in Africa may require
dialogical frameworks that are less prescriptive (Mutenherwa and Wassenaar 2014).
Critique against ethics review in community psychology concerns the origins of the
three principles – the Belmont Report – which was written in response to growing
concerns about research misconduct in the medical field (Wendler 2012). While the
principles that are highlighted in the Belmont Report are important for the protec-
tion that they afford research participants, they are limited in their utility for the
navigation of ethical dilemmas that researchers may be confronted with when con-
ducting community psychology research with marginalised communities in the
Global South.
Regulatory guidelines are often at odds with the character of qualitative research
(Hammersley and Traianou 2012). In part, this is related to the inadequacy of the
‘principlisim’ inherent in regulatory ethics that renders it inept at responding to
context-bound complexities (Onuoha 2007; Wiles 2013); as well as the biomedical
research origins of these ethical codes. What guides ethical research conduct may
not always be a conscious engagement with ethical frameworks. This need not mean
that ethical frameworks have no utility whatsoever. For example, Wiles (2013)
argues that often researchers rely on their own sense of moral judgement. What
remains though, is that researchers are expected to justify the decisions they make.
Wiles (2013) then proposes that ethical decision-making may need to apply levels
of reasoning that draw on the researcher’s moral sense (informed by their values) as
well as the various ethical codes and disciplinary codes at their disposal. Thus, for
Wiles, ultimately ethical dilemmas need to be evaluated in terms of principlist eth-
ics (beneficence, non-maleficence, honesty, and fairness).
The regulatory approach to ethics is also problematised in Community
Psychology scholarship for its inadequacy to respond to: differential power dynam-
ics; the history of research institutions vis-a-vis the communities we do research
with, often experienced as epistemic violence; and the discordant conceptualisa-
tions of consent, beneficence, and harm. The research ethics that guide much of
institutional research endeavours are largely founded on a concept of asymmetry of
power between the researcher and those with whom they do research. However, in
this formulation, there is little acknowledgement of the power wielded by Research
Ethics Committees (RECs), which have tangible effects on the relational interplay
between the researcher and study participants. There is a need to critically engage
the misconception that research participants always enter sexuality studies with lit-
tle or no power. While it is acknowledged that researchers have agenda-setting
power, we should not neglect to consider that research participants often bring their
own agenda into the research relationship and in many instances, they drive these
agendas with as much resolve and determination as researchers drive their own
(Oliffe and Mróz 2005). Scholars such as Juristzen et al. (2011) argue that research
participants could be harmed by some of the protective efforts of ethics monitoring
bodies. As such, following Silva et al. (2011), I contend that it is necessary to con-
sider how these traditional conceptions and procedures of research ethics might be
modified through a decolonial feminist approach to research ethics in community
118 H. Matutu
I am interested in the tensions that result from expanding what is considered ‘doing
community psychologies’ and incorporating the personal while focusing on the
emancipatory potential of non-oppression, or liberation-oriented community psy-
chologies. What might be lost in the effacing of ‘the personal’ in community psy-
chologies that centre non-oppression and liberation ideals in researching
marginalised communities – particularly LGBTQI and other sexual minorities?
Drawing on the study I conducted with NGI MSM, I now turn to exploring how
ethics in the conduct of community psychology research with these forms of com-
munities are affected by the void created by this ontological gap, as well as the regu-
latory approaches to research ethics favoured within the academy.3 To do this, I
frame my discussion around Cannella and Manuelito’s (2008) feminist decolonial
perspective, which understands the research encounter as multivocal, fluid and
hybrid. I also heed Cannella and Manuelito’s call for the consideration of the mate-
rial effects of oppression on the marginalised – especially their call for researchers
to attempt facilitating a social justice agenda. Arguing that by combining these anti-
oppression, liberatory approaches, we may bridge the artificial divide between what
is considered to relate to community and the personal in community psychology
sexuality enquiries.
It is said that the academy uses the pain of our research participants, many who are
impoverished, disenfranchised and exhibiting some form of deficiency – for the
personal gain of researchers (Tuck and Yang 2014; Wiles 2013). From this vantage
point, it could be argued that I was involved in this very type of exploitative and
parasitic tendency. The men I spoke to between December 2017 and September
2018, marginalised to differing levels, living in the shadows of their families and
communities, and almost all carrying feelings of wishing to belong could fit this
framing of victims of a capitalistic and voyeuristic academy. From a different van-
tage point we could see the men who took part in this study as agentive. They chose
to speak with me, many of them had strong feelings about what they wanted to be
known about them. Ian, in the exchange below, in an interview that was conducted
3
By regulatory I mean an orientation that is concerned with prescribing what one might do in the
context of conducting research, as well as the prohibition of forms of conduct that are deemed to
be unethical.
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 119
via text messages, illustrates this capacity to refuse. He had simply ignored my
probing into his avoidance of talking about relationships:
04/18, 20:13 – Haile: The last thing I asked you was about how you liked to change
the subject when a question about relationships came up.
Haile: I didn’t want to read into that…
Ian: I do it only because of being used and hurt in the past.
Haile: Okay… I hear you… anything you would like to share about that…
Ian: Not really.
Tuck and Yang (2014) theorise refusals not as “subtractive, [but as] theoretically
generative and expansive” (p.239). They argue that a methodology of refusals
regards limits on knowledge as productive. This form of refusal is an attempt to
place limits on the colonial premise of frontiers where knowledge signifies con-
quest. In all their interviews these men never missed an opportunity to tell me off, if
there was anything they were not willing to go into with me. This capacity to refuse
is something I relished whenever it came up in our exchanges, be they the inter-
views that were recorded and formed the corpus of this study or in the multiple
messages we exchanged before they agreed to sit with me for what one man called
“the interview”.
One of the challenges of doing research with marginalised groups, let alone one
that aims at emancipatory and liberatory goals, is not only reaching them but also
engaging them in a process that would lead to them being partners in those enqui-
ries. The men in this study were recruited to share their experiences of talking about
embodying non-normative sexualities; there was no expressed need for them to take
part in a study such as this. This may seem to be at odds with the ideas of doing
community psychology, especially since it is recommended that researchers should
not impose their own ideas of bringing about change in communities but should
rather wait to be approached by communities before intervening (see Tomlinson and
Swartz 2002). The men I spoke with were uniformly interested in talking about their
lives and their sense of ‘being in the world’. There was no a priori need for my
intervention per se. Instead, we were drawn together either by our interest in
embodying these differential selves or by our perceived sense of difference and
resultant fascination with how others who are part of this ‘community’ may be navi-
gating the worlds we find ourselves in. One participant, Jason, when asked what
would have made the interview better, indicated that he would have found it benefi-
cial to be interviewed with other men in similar situations.
Jason: Maybe to sit and hear real stories of other gents told from the heart.
Haile: I see. It is difficult to do that when everyone wants to remain anonymous…
but it’s an idea…
Jason: Ja, hey.
These exchanges were facilitated by an ethics of care. Ethics of care is relational
and does not involve a consideration of general rules but rather a desire to act in a
manner that benefits the individual/ group that is the focus of inquiry. Some regard
it as a form of virtue ethics (see Wiles 2013) as it consolidates an ideal of what ethi-
120 H. Matutu
cal research conduct might look like and relies on notions of an aspirational charac-
ter. The benefit of creating this relational environment, where I intentionally
humanise the research encounter by privileging reciprocity over objectivity while
centring their capacity to refuse, is evident in the exchange I had with Ben:
Haile: Yet I sense that it makes you uncomfortable.
Ben: What this?
Haile: Well from the response you’ve just given
Ben: Oh no, the only reason why I’m here, is because you’re accessing the
brain. And a little of my heart through my brain. Not my heart, but
my person. Through asking me pointed questions.
Haile: Okay…
Ben: Actual questions that go into “what did you think about this; how do
you view this; what’s the label of that?” these things my mind can
work with. And occasionally you add this “how does it make you
feel”, which is fine. But if the premise is always the guiding sort of
like structure… it’s always like “how does your mind or your person-
ality guide you through this experience?”, then I’m okay with that.
But you know, that doesn’t always happen in the one on one connec-
tion you have – maybe if I ever have one with Pearl or people on a day
to day at [name of nightclub]. This [clears throat] safe zone, as it
were, normal exchange of mind and thought or whatever does not
exist out there, sunshine. People are there with hunger, they are out
there with intent, they’re out there with needs, desires. You know
these things. Me too, of course! But then it becomes a smorgasbord
of whatever the hell goes on. Before this meeting, you’ve set out
“okay, Ben: You can end at any time, you can walk away at any time,
you can do this, you can… not answer these things” These things are
structures that I feel comfortable with. Because you gave me a struc-
ture to work in, and that you’re gonna work within! And that is awe-
some! [clapping his hands] Now how many times does this
safeguarding happen there? The short answer is no. Not often.
Reconsidering Consent
In studies where participants have completed consent forms via email, it is useful to
revisit the issue of consent at the beginning of the interview. This is important
because the researcher is never present when participants sign online consent forms,
and there is no way of knowing if they understand the conditions under which they
are participating in the studies (Jowett et al. 2011). It is also important to be cogni-
zant of participant fatigue which often manifests itself through body language such
as arms on the fold or explicitly checking the time” (Oliffe and Mróz 2005, p. 259).
In online interviews it is not easy to read these cues. Assessing a participant’s capac-
ity to consent in online research is challenging. The researcher contractually bound
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 121
As perplexed as I was about Marc’s apparent slow engagement and the delays in
communication it became apparent to me when I reviewed the transcript that an
hour after we had started the conversation, we had only covered issues of ethics. I
spent much of this time trying to figure out if he was legitimate. I was also con-
cerned that he was too keen to speak without understanding what participation
meant. By adhering to this rigid conceptualisation of ethics, I had brought about an
untenable and unreasonable demand on Marc’s time. What was meant to be an hour
interview turned into a long chat over 15 days. Much of this was because Marc
could only speak when he was alone, which tended to be in spurts of 15-minute
intervals. He eventually stopped communicating with me after a few days of similar
lines of questioning.
While the encounter with Marc proved that an unreflexive adherence to ethical
frameworks may be counterproductive, in other encounters, there was much to gain
in constantly renegotiating consent. In a different interview, I found myself needing
to remind a participant that he was still on the record. A level of refusal may be use-
ful in navigating the issue of consent, where participants may forget that they are
still part of a research project due to the personal nature of the encounter.
A psychologist shall refrain from entering into a multiple relationship if such multiple rela-
tionship could reasonably be expected to impair the psychologist’s objectivity, competence
or effectiveness in performing his or her functions as psychologist or otherwise risk exploi-
tation or harm to the person or organisation with whom the professional relationship exists.
(HPCSA 2006, p. 6).
While the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) rules of conduct’s
framing of dual relationships is useful for therapeutic contexts. It has very limited
utility for feminist decolonial research, this approach centres relationality, and prob-
lematises the boundaries that are imposed between the researcher and the researched
(Figueroa 2014). The decolonial feminist approach “reveals and actively challenges
122 H. Matutu
social systems, discourses and institutions that are oppressive and that perpetuate
injustice” (Cannella and Manuelito 2008). That is, feminist decolonial research
explicitly centres the political. In contrast, Hammersley and Traianou (2012) for-
ward an argument for a decentring of politics from the research process by claiming
that the political might be a motive for the conduct of research but that it should not
substitute its institutionalised goal. The perception here is that if these ‘motives’ as
they refer to them, were to be the goals of research, they would likely increase the
danger of error in findings.
What transpired between me and the men I interviewed was something alto-
gether different from what the literature said an interview could be. How this hap-
pened, I am not entirely sure. I was terrified of admitting to this fact, but it is
important for what I propose in terms of reaching and engaging knowledge co-
creators. In the initial stages of this research I lived in fear of my ethics review com-
mittee. No one had ever told me I should be fearful of this institutional committee.
Even my engagement with them at my proposal defence was nothing short of what
could be considered a pleasant engagement with scholars who were well versed in
all the theory, methodology and methods I was proposing to deploy in the imple-
mentation of this study. Yet, in the first year of this study, there was seldom a moment
when I was not thinking about what this group of very agreeable scholars could do
to influence my future prospects of doing this form of work were I to make any
blunder or compromise the integrity of the institutionally sanctioned study – which
I always imagined should be above reproach. I lived in constant fear that what came
to me as most natural would lead to me being reported as a person with bad ethics
or rather one who lacked ethics in the conduct of research. In this way, principlist
ethics served to ‘make strange what is most familiar’ to me (see Manganyi 1984);
that is, it alienated me from my very sense of being African.
Much of the interactions with the men who took part in this study were facilitated
by a rapport that took a long time to develop. I was in conversation with some of
these men for about eight months before they agreed to take part in this study. In that
time, we spoke at length about many issues related to queer subjectivity, their
thoughts about being men in a society that is at times antagonistic towards differ-
ence. These exchanges created a form of intimacy that may not be recognisable as
‘doing research’ if one were to look at them through the prism of detached positivist
research. While I would not characterise these as friendship, there is something
deeply human in the way they evolved. While the openness with which I approached
the relationship building of these inter-views was firmly rooted in the epistemic
orientation of this study, I was also unsure about what was developing between me
and the research participants. At times I wondered if the familiarity that was emerg-
ing could be seen as ‘faking friendship’ (see Newton 2016).
I was a researcher in an online community known for its fickleness, superficiality
and aversion to anything approximating depth. My friends often told me that noth-
ing of substance could come out of Grindr. Yet I persisted with my profile (Fig. 1),
even citing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It was by putting ‘substance’ in my profile that
allowed the rich and layered conversations I was to eventually have with some of the
men on this platform. It became important that I inserted myself (my relationship
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 123
status) in the midst of what I was trying to do, (i.e. looking for opportunities to
speak about non-normative subjectivity).
The idea that I shared characteristics with some of them became the reason that
some of men responded to me, and ultimately participated in the study. Of course
“Chat and Networking” are sometimes used by men to denote all manner of
conversations; not all of it is devoid of ‘the sexual’. Similarly, ‘Networking’ can
incorporate a number of possibilities including the pedestrian variety that most
business people and academics engage in at conferences. It was important for me
that I should not pretend to be an aloof researcher because I wanted to have a more
personal engagement with the participants. This humanising orientation was not
coming through in the early stages of the recruitment. The fear of being seen to be
dabling in salacious recruitment practices was ever present.
My initial attempts at recruitment often fell flat. I toyed with variations of invita-
tions most of which made mention of the fact that this was a legitimate study. I even
supplied a UCT email address, because I believed that the institutional affiliation
would distinguish this invitation from other fantastical invitations that the platform’s
users may have been in the habit of receiving. Figure 2, Doing Research Right, illus-
trates how many of the unsolicited invitations were perceived. In his study with a
similar population, Walby (2010) chose to not openly address his own sense of sex-
ual identity in terms of a category, such as gay. Instead, he took a vaguer approach to
124 H. Matutu
answering a question that many queer people ask in these research settings, that is,
‘are you gay?’. He is reluctant to engage what he considers ‘bonding ploys’.
‘Bonding ploys’ that result from participants assuming a shared insider identity
with the researcher are problematised by some scholars (for example, Schwalbe and
Wolkomir 2001), the argument being that in the context of queer research these
ploys may create a sexualised rapport. I am uncertain about the utility of these
measures of control for the manner in which they approximate positivist aspirations
of neutrality and for their attempts at presenting an asexual and somewhat detached
researcher subjectivity. This position should not be taken as advocating for unbri-
dled boundless sexualisation of the research encounter. Rather we should consider
it as an attempt to extend the humanizing orientation of sexuality research and
extend this perspective to include the researcher. However, my concern is not to
indiscriminately centre the sexuality of the researcher, as that would defeat the aims
of research. It is the narratives of the participants that we are most interested in. It is
my contention that we may elicit these without de-humanizing the researcher.
The discourse of the confessional plays out in a didactic manner in interviews
where men interview MSM. The expectation that one ought to confess something
about their sexuality goes both ways and may influence the direction of rapport
within that encounter (Walby 2010). I too had a story of speaking about my own
queer subjectivity. Many of the participants in this study were privy to this knowl-
edge, even though for the most part my own story became known to them after we
had sat for our ‘on the record’ interviews. What became apparent to me were the
versions of the narrative of my speaking of non-normative subjectivity that different
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 125
participants heard. The way I constructed the story of my ‘being in the world’ was
always different depending on the person with whom I was speaking. The facts of
the narrative never changed, however, the details and how I framed myself within
these was informed by the degree that each man was comfortable with aspects of
their own subjectivity. With Mark I could speak about being a Xhosa man and what
that did to my relationship with my father. This happened in a very natural way, in
our exchanges through nods at “we don’t know how to speak about being queer in
non-oppressive language”, laughing at the homophobia of our mothers’ friends, for
example. Yet with some others, there was an assumed freedom in my version of
queerness, with Mike noting that “it’s different for your generation” (Mike was a
few years older than me but is married with two children). Where it was appropriate,
I opened up about my own struggles and achievements. There was however, one
narrative which at the time was not complete – how I spoke to my parents about
embodying my sexual identity.
References
Cannella, G. S., & Manuelito, K. D. (2008). Feminisms from unthought locations. Indigenous
worldviews, marginalised feminisms, and revisioning an anticolonial social science. In N. K.
Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodolo-
gies (pp. 45–59). Los Angeles: Sage.
Carolissen, R., Rohleder, P., Bozalek, V., Swartz, L., & Leibowitz, B. (2010). “Community psy-
chology is for poor, black people”: Pedagogy and teaching of community psychology in South
“On the Way to Calvary, I Lost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires in Community… 127
Ruti, M. (2017). The ethics of opting out: Queer theory’s defiant subjects. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Seedat, M., & Suffla, S. (2017). Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival lega-
ciesand decolonisation. South Africa Journal of Psychology, 47(4), 421–431. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0081246317741423.
Silva, D. S., Goering, P. N., Jacobson, N., & Streiner, D. L. (2011). Off the beaten path:
Conducting ethical pragmatic trials with marginalized populations. IRB: Ethics & Human
Research, 33(3). Accessed from https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-268311529/
off-the-beaten-path-conducting-ethical-pragmatic.
Swartz, L. P., Gibson, K., & Gelman, T. (Eds.). (2002). Reflective practice: Psychodynamic ideas
in the community. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council.
Schwalbe, M., & Wolkomir, M. (2001). The Masculine Self As Problem and Resource in
Interview Studies of Men. Men and Masculinities, 4(1), 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097
184X01004001005
Tomlinson, M., & Swartz, L. P. (2002). The “good enough” community: Power and knowledge
in south African community psychology. In L. P. Swartz, K. Gibson, & T. Gelman (Eds.),
Reflective practice: Psychodynamic ideas in the community (pp. 99–112). Cape Town: Human
Sciences Research Council.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.),
Humanizing research. Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–
247). London: Sage.
Turker, A. (2009). Queer Visibilities: Space, identity and interaction in Cape Town. Chichester,
West Sussex: John Willey & Sons.
van Wijk, E., & Harrison, T. (2013). Managing ethical problems in qualitative research involving
vulnerable populations, using a pilot study. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12,
570–586.
von Unger, H. (2016). Reflexivity beyond regulations: Teaching research ethics and qualitative meth-
ods in Germany. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(2), 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800415620220.
Walby, K. (2010). Interviews as encounters: Issues of sexuality and reflexivity when interviewing
men about commercial same sex relations. Qualitative Research, 10(6), 639–657. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1468794110380525.
Webber, V., & Brunger, F. (2018). Assessing risk to researchers: Using the case of sexuality
research to inform research ethics board guidelines. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 19(3.)
[31 paragraphs). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-19.3.3062.
Wendler, R. (2012). Human subjects protection: A source for ethical service-learning practice.
Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 29–39.
Wiles, R. (2013). What are qualitative research ethics? London: Blommsbury.
Young, I. M. (2004). The ideal of community and the politics of difference. In C. Farrelly (Ed.),
Contemporary political theory: A reader (pp. 195–204). London: SAGE.
From Where We Stand: Reflecting
On Engagements With Decolonial Feminist
Community Psychology
Peace Kiguwa and Puleng Segalo
Contents
Introduction 129
Self-Location 130
Contextualizing Community Psychology 131
Teaching, Community Work, and Research 133
Community and Research (Within and Beyond the University) 138
Inside-Out Outside-In Corrections Project 138
Young Women’s Leadership in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Project 139
Towards a Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 140
References 141
Introduction
P. Kiguwa (*)
Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Segalo
Office of Research and Graduate Studies College of Human Sciences, Pretoria, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
Self-Location
opposed to living elsewhere and embodying a different raced and gendered body.
Given this, we will have to take seriously what it means to practice and position
ourselves as decolonial African feminists in an African context. We will have to
consider the myriad ways that a feminism rooted in western-centric contexts is
problematic for African contexts. When we blindly and uncritically attempt to
understand any context through an ontological and epistemological lens that belit-
tles, fails to fully see, as well as further marginalizes how cultures and people do
gender differently, we stand in danger of enforcing a kind of epistemic violence as
researchers.
Being a decolonial feminist psychologist involves me (second author) taking
seriously the everyday structural challenges that women face in society. I am inter-
ested in the ways in which psychology plays a role in contributing towards how
women are marginalised, are perceived as helpless and in many ways without a
voice. I frame myself as a decolonial feminist psychologist because the aim is to
build on what feminism has offered us and to interrogate some of the ways in which
it addresses gender. In many ways, ‘imperial feminism’ is a feminism that operates
on behalf of American and European canons. It dominates instead of liberates; and
it does this often without taking context and geographical specificities into consid-
eration. A feminism that embraces decoloniality has the potential to see the impor-
tance of history, colonization and the impact these have had on the perpetual
gendered challenges we constantly have to contend with. I am interested in a psy-
chology that acknowledges the multi-layered, multi-textured, fluid and complex
understanding of spaces occupied by women and men.
Global South are not offered space in our theorising in community psychology.
However, within the Global South current decolonization projects have also tended
to reproduce this dichotomy of knowledge imposition. For example, decolonial
knowledge canons (based largely in South America) have also tended to marginalize
voices and knowledge contributions from Africa. Even more layered is the margin-
alization of feminist contributions to this canon of knowledge. Very few feminist
contributions to the decolonial project have been widely recognized within the
canon, with the exception of scholars such as Maria Lugones and Oyeronke
Oyěwùmí. In a series of social justice movements, gender tends to take a back seat
to race as a galvanizing stronghold that demonstrates how race has predominantly
been taken up as a political project and not gender. And yet, as scholars such as
Pumla Gqola show, gender has always been central to the colonial project. If it has
been central to the colonial project then it makes sense that it should be central to
the decolonial project.
Within South Africa in particular, much community psychology has taken a lib-
eratory stance (Freire 1993) wherein a concerted effort is made to have learning
happen within communities. However, teaching and learning in community psy-
chology is often undergirded by the assumption that researchers go into communi-
ties to ‘empower’, ‘impart knowledge’, and ‘introduce programmes’ without
acknowledging the knowledges already present in the communities. We often go in
as ‘experts’ and this can be seen in many of the practical sessions students are
required to fulfil as part of their training. It is at this point where we deem a decolo-
nial approach important for rethinking how we practice community psychology.
Community Psychology has to be self-critical and should acknowledge its complic-
ity over time on how Euro-centric knowledge was privileged and assumed applica-
ble in multiple contexts globally. Community psychology does not toss the net wide
enough to allow for the multiplicity of ways in which people engage the world.
While there has been progress within community psychology regarding the need
to acknowledge context and people’s knowledges, we would like to argue that there
is still a need to take seriously issues of gender, sex, race and class amongst others.
Not paying attention to these dimensions is problematic as it assumes that they are
not important when engaging in people’s lived realities. These omissions are even
more problematic when understood in relation to the ways in which they shape
women’s experiences. Understanding these issues from a decolonial feminist per-
spective would mean taking history and the influence of colonialism into perspec-
tive when engaging with how these play out. For example, Mmatshilo Motsei (2007,
2017) works with gender-based violence and with men in communities using a
socio-historical and feminist approach that sees violence not as intrinsic to the com-
munity or to men. She sees violence as having a history that intersects with multiple
layers of how people are violated (economically, socially, and culturally) and how
all this has a history that ties back to colonialism. She connects this with the inter-
generational transmission of trauma so that the attainment of masculinity comes to
be seen as something that is violent. Her work offers an example of how a decolo-
nial feminism might be possible and the ways in which community psychology can
be practiced from a decolonial perspective.
From Where We Stand: Reflecting On Engagements With Decolonial Feminist… 133
Cosgrove and McHugh (2000) maintain that community psychology has indeed
incorporated elements of feminism in its engagements with oppression and injus-
tice. However, they also point out that the sub-discipline has not fully embraced
feminist scholarship. We would argue that this may not always have been the case.
Community and feminist psychology both challenge and engage with assumptions
made by mainstream psychology; often uncritical in how it engages societal issues.
Mainstream psychology does not pay particular attention to political, historical, cul-
tural and structural issues that play a role in how people make sense of the world.
Specifically looking at women, mainstream psychology often defines women as
lacking, helpless and needing to be rescued. They are marginalized and assumed to
have no agency. As Cosgrove and McHugh (2000, p. 816) note, “as feminist
researchers we challenge the implicit values in traditional research that render
women as Other and conflate difference with deficiency”. In our psychological
research endeavours it is important to critically engage theories and methodologies
used to make sense of what we know and how we come to know. What does it mean
to privilege feminist understandings of the world? It is this privileging that we want
to pay particular attention to and we do this by drawing from a decolonial feminist
perspective which we believe can assist us to move towards a decolonial feminist
community psychology. And yet, the work that continues to be prescribed in most
community psychology classes relies on “traditional, psychologistic assumptions
about subjectivity” (Cosgrove and McHugh 2000, p. 824). Those who have
embraced a critical stance still do not centre feminist theories in their engagement
with communities. In this sense then, mainstream community psychology has been
deeply problematic as a resource for decolonial and feminist interventions within
the community. In the rest of the chapter, we point to ways in which this can be
addressed. Drawing from a number of examples based on our own work, we high-
light what this might look like by providing examples that show how we attempt to
move towards an action-oriented and a liberatory approach in our teaching and in
the research projects that we are part of.
has been centralized by acknowledging the need for pluriversal ways of knowing
and being. A pluriversal approach allows us not only to gain a sense of marginalised
scholars’ contributions to psychology as a discipline but also to engage with the
socio-political context.
The materiality of race and gender is important to address as one of the key gaps
of the discipline and as characterised by western-centric knowledge canons. By
materiality we refer to the phenomenological experiences of race and gender as
these are embodied in the lived realities and bodies of black Africans. Here, race and
gender do not just function as structural realities that exist in social policies and
institutional structures but also come to take on real embodied ‘livedness’ in peo-
ple’s lives and bodies. How we understand gender and race in our work must there-
fore incorporate these micro embodiments. Canons of knowledge that tend to favour
so-called objectivist, individualist, and empirical forms of knowing do not acknowl-
edge these subjective and micro politics of human subjectivities to the detriment of
enhancing social justice interventions in communities. We argue that borrowed
ways of knowing, such as the view that gender is binary (Oyěwùmí 1997) that we
have given home in our minds, cannot be used as a basis to imagine and transcend
coloniality. We acknowledge that often the fundamental framework of our studies is
not African. We may have an African perspective (that purportedly addresses
African ways of knowing) but when our work relies on such alienating epistemolo-
gies/theories, we stand in danger of engaging in epistemic violence in our interven-
tions. Our aim therefore is to think from where we are unashamedly; and this starts
with the pedagogical practices we employ.
We see the teaching space as a dialogical space that involves students and teach-
ers engaged in a dialogue about themselves and their society. This involves shifting
from the obsession with the end product/outcome and instead focusing on the pro-
cess of learning and creating an environment where students are active participants
in the creation of knowledge. In so doing, we align ourselves with Paulo Freire’s
(1993) notion of liberatory pedagogy which prioritises the student’s capacity for
critically reflecting on the world with a view to transforming it. In this instance the
student and teacher are both co-creators of knowledge, where at one given moment
one takes on the role of the teacher (and the other a student) and at another moment
the other takes on that role. Where a large class size of 500+ students makes it chal-
lenging to be creative, the temptation is to deliver the lecture in a banking model
(Freire 1993). While a bigger size class may be challenging, it is not impossible to
deviate from the traditional banking roles of teaching. For example, the ways in
which the curriculum is structured should be in such a way that allows for a dia-
logue and not a rigid model and approach to teaching. Students should be able to
speak back to the curriculum and in that way contribute towards the reshaping of it.
There should be space for them to draw from their experiential ways of knowing.
For example, mainstream psychology’s construct of the self that is introduced in the
history of psychology invalidates other ways of knowing that are rooted in commu-
nity and other relational networks.
The process of how we teach and what we teach has many implications for how
we assess. Traditional methods of assessments favour particular understandings and
From Where We Stand: Reflecting On Engagements With Decolonial Feminist… 135
forms of knowledge to the detriment of others. For example, multiple choice forms
of assessment require students to choose from a selection of pre-determined answers
thereby not allowing space for engagement, disagreement or critique. Many forms
of assessment force students to memorise what they have learnt in a quantitative
manner (e.g. how much can you remember?) as opposed to qualitative shifts in
learning, such as students’ ability to reflect on the socio-political context of their
world. It is these shifts that influence and contribute to students’ capacity for trans-
forming their world. A community psychology that is committed to being relevant
should prioritise the latter form of learning and assessment.
Further complicating assessment practice is the role of prioritised languages in
South Africa (such as English and Afrikaans) as primary mediums for assessment.
These mediums function to exclude speakers of other languages who, given the
chance might be able to articulate their knowledge more efficiently if allowed the
opportunity to engage in a language they are more comfortable with. The quantita-
tive mode of assessment demands the use of the prioritised languages whereas a
more qualitative mode of assessment that is focused on students’ critically reflective
shifts allows for the possibility of a more inclusive engagement. This will include
students engaging in their preferred language. What we are calling for is a rethink-
ing of current pedagogical practices that emphasise written assessment tasks to the
exclusion of other modes of engagement. Both students and teachers may feel a
sense of discomfort with such a pedagogical shift. However, as Bozalek et al. (2010)
have argued, discomfort is fundamental to consciousness raising. The urge to make
ourselves and our students comfortable in the classroom makes it impossible to
engage fully and reflexively. This is akin to Leonardo and Porter’s (2010) notion of
a pedagogy of disruption which posits disruption not as repressive violence but as
productive violence. The latter allows for authentic dialogue and interrogation of
our place in society. For example, a curriculum that disrupts whiteness as the centre
of knowledge and normative way of being is very often received by many white
students in the class as violent. We maintain however, that this form of violence is
necessary and productive in its invitation for more authentic forms of engagement
that is not characterised by coloniality of power.
Pedagogic disruption is also important to how we re-imagine the supervision
space and the transmission of knowledge between student and supervisor. In keep-
ing with Freire’s (1993) notion of critical pedagogy, we advocate for the supervision
space as a reflective dialogical space that considers how both the student and the
supervisor are co-constructors of knowledge. Part of this process entails reflecting
on our choices for research topic exploration including how we mentor and reflect
with students their engagements with the communities that they work with in this
process. This relationship between student and supervisor is very important for
mentorship and inculcation into a critically reflexive epistemology whereby the stu-
dent begins to understand in practice the ideological and political ramifications of
self-positioning in research. Furthermore, the supervision process itself is a devia-
tion from the banking model in which the supervisor is positioned as the arbiter of
knowledge to one which recognises that there will be moments where the student
becomes the teacher and the teacher becomes the student. For example, in a study
136 P. Kiguwa and P. Segalo
The idea of ‘academic acculturation’ has been used by scholars such as Davis (2008)
to describe the mentorship process that happens between students and faculty mem-
bers of the academy. Academic acculturation engages those processes and practices
whereby new and emerging scholars – who may include students and/or emerging
faculty members within an institution – are socialised into the disciplinary and insti-
tutional profession by an established scholar. The latter person takes on the role of
From Where We Stand: Reflecting On Engagements With Decolonial Feminist… 137
socialising the newcomer into the values, networks and resources necessary for suc-
cessful adaptation to the new context. Such a process and practice is further made
complex through intersections of race, sexuality, disability, class, language and gen-
der dynamics that can either hinder or enhance the mentorship process. Understanding
the challenges and experiences of marginalised bodies within the academy requires
a more critically reflective effort at understanding the role and practice of mentorship
within institutions. Davis (2007) demonstrates that the career trajectory and aspira-
tions of many black students and staff are likely to be influenced by the lack, quality
and form of mentorship that they experience within the institution. Her study also
highlights the importance and role of black faculty as mentors to black students and
other black faculty members. This is a finding that Chan (2008) also highlights in a
study on mentoring ethnic minorities in the academy.
In our experiences as emerging scholars we experienced several challenges
related to finding mentors as emerging black feminist women scholars. In our ear-
lier work (Segalo and Kiguwa 2015) we pointed to the struggles that we were con-
fronted with as a result of a lack of mentorship and mirrors we could look into so as
to imagine the journey ahead. The discipline of psychology for a long time refused
to offer a platform to women (Black women, in particular) scholars thereby making
it difficult for many of us to imagine ourselves occupying such spaces. A transfor-
mative mentorship makes it possible to re-imagine our sense of belonging in the
academy. In this sense, we re-imagine the academic space as community; a place
where our identities are not questioned, where our knowledges are part of the canon,
and our competencies acknowledged. Furthermore, a transformative form of men-
torship should cut across hierarchies: between students and academic staff, among
staff members, and among students. This could be achieved through collaborative
projects that develop different skills and promote the interchange of skills.
Mentorship further allows for the sharing of experience and anxieties related to the
bureaucratic functioning of the academy. For example, in my (second author) work
with women academics at my institution we have created what we call Women
Researchers Corner which is a platform that brings together both emerging and estab-
lished women researchers. This platform aims at providing space for the sharing of
ideas, guidance on how to confront challenges linked to studies (mainly Masters and
Doctoral studies), writing funding proposals, navigating the academic space more
broadly, and how to respond to negative feedback. This engagement is not confined to
the university space as we also go on retreats off-campus where we spent time engag-
ing the multiple challenges faced by women researchers. In another example, at my
(first author) institution we have formed the Women Intellectuals Transforming
Scholarship in Education which consists of academic staff and students. This group
provides a space for sharing research ideas, a platform for engaging scholarship for
women and by women. It is also about developing skills for sourcing of funding and
a space for sharing anxieties, experiences and ideas in how we engage with the broader
university community. We further provide skills-building workshops. These examples
highlight the necessity to shift away from traditional modes of mentorship that (1)
impose and sustain hierarchies of power; (2) do not create spaces for the personal and
(3) do not recognise the importance of (Black) women only spaces.
138 P. Kiguwa and P. Segalo
The Inside-Out Outside-In project that I (second author) am a member of, started as
an interest group that later morphed into a formal community engagement project.
The project seeks to create a platform that engages the lived experiences of offend-
ers, ex-offenders and corrections officials. The project looks broadly at some of the
challenges faced by incarcerated women, notions of motherhood and fatherhood
From Where We Stand: Reflecting On Engagements With Decolonial Feminist… 139
while incarcerated, and challenges faced by ex-offenders upon their release from
the corrections facilities. The project looks broadly at the multi-layered functioning
of corrections and zooms in at the possibility of rehabilitation and what it means
through the lens of those who are part of this system. It is a collaborative project that
involves multiple stakeholders and collaborators with the hope and aim of having
multiple voices engaging on challenges and possibilities linked to corrections. It is
a university project housed in a Psychology department but functions in close part-
nership with multiple correctional facilities based in various parts of South Africa.
Through engagement with our collaborators, we learn with and from each other and
together critique and re-imagine what corrections could look like and we further
imagine the possibility of a differently functioning system. The idea is to work
towards a system that opens itself up to the possibility of thinking differently about
how we deal with and respond to ‘societal norm digressions’. A decolonial feminist
community psychology is a useful theoretical lens that helps us to do the work of
tackling masculinities in societies, especially what we would call toxic masculini-
ties. A feminist approach challenges patriarchal and hegemonic notions of what it
means to be a man. The Inside out-Outside in project importantly focuses on male
prisoners because it is about addressing toxic masculinities and doing the work of
reimagining what a healthy masculinity could look like. One of the aims of decolo-
niality is not to impose but be involved in a participatory intervention process that
allows space for people in the community (in this case, the corrections facility com-
munity) to determine their own needs as part of this reimagining.
The project takes a participatory action approach wherein all the stakeholders
contribute towards the shaping and identifying of concerns to be given attention and
the possible directions to be taken in responding to identified issues. In their article
entitled Participatory Action Research: From Within and Beyond Prison Bars, Fine
et al. (2004) engage with the various ways in which a participatory approach offers
space for multiple voices and perspectives that lend themselves to de-centralising
where the power lies. Their work points to the importance of having a multi-
stakeholder collaboration when planning, executing and implementing a project.
Working within the Corrections environment, they highlight challenges and oppor-
tunities that exist when working within a highly regulated and securitised space.
The Young Women’s Leadership in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
research team (YWL in SRHR) that I (first author) currently coordinate with a team
of colleagues seeks to develop young women researchers in the field of sexual and
reproductive rights. This seven year-old project creates a platform for young women
students within the tertiary education context to develop their critical research skills
while also developing their psychosocial engagements with the university and the
140 P. Kiguwa and P. Segalo
community at large. Through weekly research mentorship meetings that involve all
members of the team reading, sharing and discussing aspects of their own and the
group project, this platform provides a space for the mentorship and growth of
women academics that is not typically cultivated in this context. The team has also
formed partnerships with community and Non-Governmental partners that high-
light the necessity for bridging the academic-activist divide that tends to exist in the
academy. These partnerships entail work related to gender-based violence, conduct-
ing workshops and intervention community briefings that engage the community in
aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Through these briefings we
construct a platform for dialogue and reflexivity related to core tensions in doing
feminist participatory action research and critically interrogating the notion of
empowerment. The Project’s epistemological thrust is that matters of sexual and
gender violence in South Africa and the continent more broadly, are structurally and
intra-psychically intersected with a psycho-political history of colonialism that con-
tinues to influence current configurations of violence. In addressing gender-based
violence and sexual and reproductive rights for women, it is important that such a
psycho-political history is considered in how we conceptualize and intervene in dif-
ferent contexts. Gendered configurations and experiences embody the struggles,
contradictions and tensions of such a history that in turn influence how the personal
configured in the social and vice versa is a political and not just psychological
project.
The above two examples highlight the importance of not treating community
sites as merely sites for data collection whereby proposals for recommendations are
made that do not include the voices of the community. Decolonial feminist com-
munity psychology recognises the arbitrary divide that tends to exist between the
academy and activist spaces. This divide posits superficial claims to legitimate
knowledge in the one domain to the detriment of the other. Thus indigenous knowl-
edges are often positioned as ‘non-academic’ or ‘non-scientific’ and therefore
illegitimate.
researchers, that involves shared learning and that includes joint intervention brain-
storming. In this chapter we have highlighted and shared some of our ideas for re-
conceptualising community psychology practice from a decolonial feminist
perspective. We note some of our tensions and discomforts as black female academ-
ics working in institutions of higher learning that continuously separate the practice
of the academy in teaching and research from broader community practice. We
argue that this divide remains an artificial one that only serves to reinforce hierar-
chies of power in knowledge production. Through examples of some of our mentor-
ship, teaching and community practice, we demonstrate some of the ways that
decolonial feminist community psychology entails a shift in epistemological lens as
well as adoption of teaching and research practice that deviates from the traditional
approach of objective and expert observers. A decolonial feminist community psy-
chology endeavours to reframe how we think about communities, how we concep-
tualise our roles as knowledge producers, the politics of knowledge dissemination
and teaching as critical pedagogical practice.
References
Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Leibowitz, B., & Boler, M. (2010). Introduction. In V. Bozalek,
R. Carolissen, B. Leibowitz, & M. Boler (Eds.), Discerning critical hope in education prac-
tices (pp. 1–8). New York: Routledge.
Chan, A. W. (2008). Mentoring ethnic minority, pre-doctoral students: An analysis of key mentor
practices. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 16(3), 263–277.
Chauke, T. (forthcoming). Women’s conceptualisation of sexual liberation in patriarchal contexts
of a democratic South Africa: An ethnographic study of a rural community in Mpumalanga,
(PhD Thesis, forthcoming).
Cosgrove, L., & McHugh, M. C. (2000). Speaking for ourselves: Feminist methods and commu-
nity psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 28(6), 815–838.
Davis, D. J. (2007). Access to academe: The importance of mentoring to black students. Negro
Educational Review, 58(3/4), 217.
Davis, D. J. (2008). Mentorship and the socialization of underrepresented minorities into the
professoriate: Examining varied influences. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning,
16(3), 278–293.
Dutta, U. (2016). Prioritizing the local in an era of globalization: A proposal for decentering com-
munity psychology. American Journal of Psychology, 0, 1–10.
Fine, M., Torre, M. E., Boudin, K., Bowen, I., Clark, J., Hylton, D., & Upegui, D. (2004).
Participatory action research: From within and beyond prison bars. In P. Camic, J. E. Rhodes,
& L. Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodol-
ogy and design (pp. 173–198). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. New York: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Gqola, P. D. (2015). Rape: A South African nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books.
Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in
race dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759.
Lykes, M. B. (2013). Participatory and action research as a transformative praxis: Responding to
humanitarian crises from the margins. American Psychologist, 68, 774–783.
142 P. Kiguwa and P. Segalo
Motsei, M. (2007). The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Zacob
Zuma. Auckland Park: Jacana Media.
Motsei, M. (2017). Reweaving the soul of the nation. Pretoria: Afrika Ikalafe.
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women. In Making African sense of western gender dis-
courses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Prilleltensky, I. (2012). Value-based praxis in community psychology: Moving towards social jus-
tice and social action. What is psychology to do. Journal of Social Issues, 68, 612–629.
Seedat, M., & Lazarus, S. (2011). Community psychology in South Africa: Origins, developments,
and manifestations. Journal of Community Psychology, 39, 241–257.
Segalo, P., & Kiguwa, P. (2015). XIV. Through our own eyes: A conversation between two South
African psychology feminist scholars. Feminism & Psychology, 25(1), 78–83.
Sonn, C. (2016). Swampscott in international context: Expanding our ecology of knowledge.
American Journal of Community Psychology, 58, 309–313.
Performative Activism and Activist
Performance: Young People Engaging
in Decolonial Feminist Community
Psychology in Contemporary South
African Contexts
Tamara Shefer
Contents
Introduction 143
Contemporary Contexts of Intersectional Feminist Queer Discourse and Practice
in South Africa 145
Performative Art for Feminist Decoloniality 146
Queer Performative Activism in the Disruption of Racist Heteronormativity 148
Collective Embodied Action Against Sexual Violence 149
Concluding Thoughts: Towards a Critical Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology 151
References 153
Introduction
South Africa is a quarter of a century into the post-apartheid democracy and efforts
to rebuild a socially just society, yet high rates of sexual and gendered violence
persist which are entangled with systemic violence shaped by centuries of coloni-
zation and decades of apartheid (Boonzaier 2017; Gqola 2015). It is also evident,
however, that the many efforts to challenge such inequalities, injustices and vio-
lence, at scholarly, policy and community-based levels, are not as effective as
hoped, and may even serve to reinstate and bolster existing discourses and prac-
tices of sexual and gender injustice and inequality. Notwithstanding what has been
well acknowledged as an excellent piece of constitutional and legal machinery in
support of gender equality (Rustin 2018), South Africa remains characterized by
T. Shefer (*)
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape,
Cape Town, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]
high rates of gender and sexual violence, homophobia and homophobic violence
and sexism and racism at multiple levels of the societal, political, ideological and
material.
South African community psychology directed at social justice goals has a rela-
tively long history, emerging out of critiques of mainstream psychological services
that were the exclusive preserve of white and middle-class South Africans, and as a
part of the larger anti-apartheid and mass democratic movements, particularly from
the 1980s onward (see for example, the Psychology in Society Journal founded in
1980; Duncan et al. 2015; Naidoo et al. 2007; Ratele et al. 2004; Visser and Moleko
2012). In many ways, community psychology in South Africa encapsulated the
goals of developing a more socially relevant project for psychology as a discipline
and profession. In this respect, community psychology was and remains directed at
attempting to address both the accessibility of services to support and promote
social-psychological health that goes beyond individualized, inaccessible services,
and to work in preventative ways to challenge material and discursive forces that
undermine subjective and community mental health and well-being. Writing in the
South African context, Naidoo et al. (2007, p. 12) defined Community Psychology
as ‘an emerging branch of applied psychology concerned with understanding peo-
ple in the context of their communities, using a variety of interventions (including
prevention, health promotion and social action), to facilitate change and improved
mental health and social conditions for individuals, groups, organisations and com-
munities (Naidoo et al. 2007, p. 12). While this field of psychology became
entrenched in South African psychology from the late 1980s, for example taught as
part of the clinical and counseling training for South African psychologists in many
local universities, there has been little work up until recently that engages with
decoloniality and feminist theory and community psychology. Moreover, as Reyes
Cruz and Sonn (2011, p. 209), writing across transnational contexts argue, the dom-
inant canon in community psychology has tended to reproduce the authority of the
psychologist as researcher and professional and reinforced the trope of the commu-
nity psychologist as focusing on challenges ‘that exists outside of the observer (i.e.
researchers and practitioners)’ (Reyes Cruz and Sonn 2011, p. 209). Thus, those in
privileged positions of whiteness and middle-classness for example ‘are typically
not asked to reflect on their cultural identities because their culture is the norm’
(2011, p. 224). They argue that work in community psychology ‘requires actively
deconstructing notions of the other based on the enduring legacy of colonial rela-
tions’ (2011, p. 213). A number of other contemporary critical psychologists
(including Adams et al. 2015; and Kessi 2017) also make this point. Contemporary
South African psychologists are increasingly engaged in rethinking practices in
psychology, both in research and professional engagements (for example, Kessi and
Boonzaier 2018) and increasingly moving towards modeling a decolonial feminist
community psychology through re-thinking and re-making normative practices of
pedagogy and research.
In this chapter I explore a number of examples of what may be termed performa-
tive activism and activist performance (Shefer 2018) directed at social justice in
South Africa. I use these terms to refer to forms of mobilization and activism that
Performative Activism and Activist Performance: Young People Engaging in Decolonial… 145
The last few years in South Africa have seen an inspiring proliferation of online and
public activism, art and performance that has been directed at an intersectional
gender and sexual justice project. Student protests beginning in early 2015
strengthened existing efforts and inspired further political activism and art among
young South Africans. Notably, young people’s protests, both on and off campus,
have been firmly located within a decolonial discourse with a strong thread of
feminist and queer theory. An assertion that sexual and gender justice must be a key
part of decolonial struggle has been powerfully articulated within the larger
framework of student and public protest as well as in critical art and performances.
Intersectionality was from the start a key narrative among activists in higher
education and elsewhere, taken forward by movements such as the trans-collective
and others around sexual violence at South African universities, and also evident in
wider pedagogical and activist efforts. Also of significance in the South African
context where feminist discourse has been strongly associated with whiteness,
middle-classness and the global North (Dosekun 2007; Gouws 2016), young Black
womxn and trans people have been particularly active in leading sexual and gender
justice struggles in the decolonial movement (Gouws 2016, 2017). A clear feminist
146 T. Shefer
and queer agenda was evident in student activist calls for intersectionality in the
decolonial agenda on campus and also represented in larger public performative
activism and activist performance, as will be elaborated further.
There are many current examples of performative activism and activist performance
that disrupt ‘business as usual’ and call attention to social injustice, speaking in
particular to intersectional gender and sexual justice goals. One powerful example
is the performance by Sethembile Msezane of a Great Zimbabwe Bird during the
removal of the Cecil John Rhodes Statue at the University of Cape Town, following
calls from students and staff to decolonize the university, on the 9 April 2015 (see
also Buikema 2016, 2017; Shefer 2018). During this statue’s ejection from its
prominent place overlooking the university and the city of Cape Town (of course a
powerful colonial gesture on its own), an artistic installation by Msezane, a Masters
graduate at UCT’s fine art school was performed in parallel1. Msezane stood near
the ‘falling’ Rhodes statue for the entire few hours it took for the statue to be
removed. Msezane’s human stature with raised wings for flight gestured to the
soapstone African bird statues that were stolen from Great Zimbabwe during the
colonial period and sold on to powerful male settlers, including Rhodes (Huffman
1987; Hubbard 2009). Rhodes had purchased a number of these artworks, one of
them still housed in his former home in Groote Schuur estate in Cape Town, known
as the ‘Cecil Rhodes’ Bird’ (Hubbard 2009). Msezane later also performed this
installation at the Great Zimbabwe site in Zimbabwe as part of her performative
activist project (http://www.sethembile-msezane.com/kwasukasukela/). While the
fall of the Rhodes statue was an important political and socio-psychological
moment, that ‘marked the beginning of a new narrative about the politics of space
and belonging’ (Kessi and Boonzaier 2015, p. 3), Msezane’s installation brought a
powerful intersectional gendered lens to this decolonial moment. Constituting an
activist performance and pedagogical intervention, this installation was arguably a
poignant material-discursive disruptive moment that surfaced the entanglements of
patriarchal and colonial plunder and violence. The moment may be read as an
ascendancy of an agentic powerful African femininity, with the descent of male,
northern white settler, both a symbolic reclaiming of that which was stolen, possibly
fulfilling a larger public sense of ‘correction’, together with a political, pedagogical
and psychological call to the imperative to disrupt colonial and patriarchal logics in
the university and the broader social realm.
Importantly, then is the public acknowledgement of intersectionality, also a signifi-
cant discourse in student decolonial movements over the last few years with the per-
formative representation of the enmeshment of patriarchy and colonial power and
1
See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/15/sethembile-msezane-cecil-rhodes-
statue-cape-town-south-africa for more detailed description and http://www.sethembile-msezane.
com/projects/ for more of Msezane’s work.
Performative Activism and Activist Performance: Young People Engaging in Decolonial… 147
2
This quote appears in Buikema’s (2017) book in Dutch, shortly to be translated, and cited from a
paper presented in English at a conference in 2016 (Buikema, 2016).
148 T. Shefer
Queer and LGBTIQ+ activism, both within the larger decolonial project and also
increasingly evident within a contemporary artistic and performative activism is
growing rapidly in South African public and internet spaces. Within the student
decolonial movement, beginning in 2015, queer and feminist activists were
particularly vocal in foregrounding the intersectionality of sexual and gender justice
goals. Notable in the context of higher education is the work of the trans collective3,
including the performative activism in the group’s disruption of an exhibition at the
University of Cape Town commemorating a year since the #Rhodesmustfall
movement started (see also Gray van Heerden 2018; Shefer 2018).
Such activism has often been characterized by public and publicly available per-
formative activism and activist performance. A wide range of online performances
and youtube videos that challenge heteronormativity and its embeddedness in
colonial logics have proliferated in recent years. One such example is Johannesburg
based performing duo, FAKA, Fela Gucci and Desire Marea who describe their
project as being directed at social justice and change through art, in particular ‘to
create an eclectic aesthetic with which they express their ideas about themes central
to their experience as black queer bodies navigating the cis-hetero-topia of post-
colonial Africa’4. The duo perform music which presents themselves as non-binary
people taking pride and pleasure in frequently flamboyant dress and performance of
Black, queer embodiment and relationality, calling into question the continued
subjugation of and violences against queer people of colour. Their performances
challenge heteronormativity while also disrupting the still salient trope of the
unAfricanness of gay and queer desire and practice. As international performer, art-
ist and poet, Mykki Blanco (2017, n.p.), argues, activist artists like FAKA are ‘rede-
fining what it is to be African, queer and visible where all over the world queer
voices are being silenced’. In a reflection on their experiences of marginality and
erasure of being Black and queer, FAKA artist and performer, Desire Marea,
poignantly argues the intersectionality of subjugations and the way in which their
activism then speaks to a decolonial, feminist and queer project:
This feeling of spatial exclusion became all the more reified when I grew older
and certain contrasts my body made within spaces put me in positions of danger.
In many other instances, it was not only my very “blackness” that was in conflict
with spaces, it was my femininity and my queerness5.
In many ways, dynamic, artistic and performative engagements such as FAKA’s
powerful work that flags racist, heteronormative oppressions reproduced by the
patriarchal colonial logics that are implicit in every day social relations, as well as
3
https://www.facebook.com/transfeministcollective/posts/113220963351248, accessed 18 June
2016.
4
http://www.siyakaka.com/about-1/.
5
https://10and5.com/2016/09/22/on-visibility-and-the-illusion-of-the-safe-space/.
Performative Activism and Activist Performance: Young People Engaging in Decolonial… 149
A strong wave of protest, art and performativity against sexual violence and harass-
ment against womxn has heightened in local South African contexts over the last
few years, both through online strategic engagements (for example, Hussen 2018)
and through collective activism such as marches and protest actions (for example,
Gouws 2016, 2017). Such activism further serves a pedagogical and collective psy-
cho-social role with respect to challenging sexual and gender-based violence which
6
Siyanibona has generated 13 television episodes so far which highlight discrimination against
LBTIQ+ as well as resistances and advocacy (see for example, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=0Ew-A8B-lI0; http://www.mambaonline.com/2018/02/08/sas-first-lgbti-tv-show-
celebrates-coming-closet/)
7
Iranti is a queer human rights visual media organization based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Iranti works within a human rights framework as its foundational platform for raising issues on
Gender, Identities and Sexuality. Founded in January 2012 by Human Rights activist, photogra-
pher and curator, Jabu Pereira is formed with the clear intention of building local partnerships and
movements that use media as a key platform for lobbying, advocacy and educational interventions
across Africa. Through the use of various visual mediums such as videos, photography, audio
recording, among others it sets itself as an archive of Queer memory in ways that destabilize
numerous modes of discrimination based on gender, sexuality and sexual orientation’. (https://
www.iranti-org.co.za)
150 T. Shefer
remain challenges in contemporary South African society. Over the last few years
there have been widespread activism particularly at university campuses as part of
the #fallism movements, and in the public terrain through mass mobilizations such
as the #totalshutdown movement that challenge high rates of sexual and gender
violence in South Africa. Sexual violence is understood as built into the fabric of
South African society through the complex and interwoven heritages of coloniality,
apartheid and patriarchy (Boonzaier 2017; Gqola 2015; Ratele 2013). It is also
increasingly flagged as a particular challenge at universities where high rates of
gender-based abuses and the regulation of female students’ lives through the threat
of sexual violence and lack of safety on campus exists (for example, Bennett et al.
2007; Collins 2014; Dosekun 2013; Hames 2009;).
One key example within the student protests has been the wave of activism over
the last few years at various universities against sexual violence, which more
recently has been joined by wider community and collective activism in public
terrains against sexual violence. Linked to the larger #fallism movement since 2015,
anti-sexual violence protests were bolstered by a series of activisms at different
universities. For example, at Rhodes University, in the Eastern Cape, students
marched in the streets of the small city, Grahamstown, around the University (see
Macleod and Barker 2016, for a more detailed overview). Students called on
university leaders to challenge sexual violence on campus and revisit policies that
they argued fail to protect rape victims. Importantly, this activism which followed at
many of the other university campuses was lead by Black womxn students, which
has been noted as significant in a context where Rape Crisis movements and
feminism in general have been associated with white and middle-class womxn
(Gouws 2016). Notably, student activist endeavours frequently emphasized
embodied precarities through, for example, deploying partial nakedness with texts
such as ‘revolt’ and ‘still not asking for it’ written on activists’ bodies, challenging
victim-blaming and sexist rape myths that continue to be salient in South African
contexts (Hussen 2018). These struggles have been especially important in bringing
an intersectional project to sexual violence activism and in flagging the coloniality
and racism of sexual violence (Gouws 2016; Shefer 2018). The narratives employed
in the protests also extended, as did the actions of the trans collective, a language of
intersectionality to the larger decolonial and social justice movement in higher edu-
cation and further afield, as argued by Gouws (2016, n.p.):
The actions of women students in the #EndRapeculture campaign, on a symbolic
level, articulate how the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality positions
black African women as sexual subjects in relation to men but also in relation to
white women and white men – something that an intersectional African feminist
identity expresses.
Activism against sexual violence has in recent years increasingly deployed
online modalities to publicize events and mobilize, which also serve as strategic
political activism and pedagogical interventions in their own right (Hussen 2018).
The #MeToo global movement, other more national-based movements such as the
Icelandic #freethenipple (Rúdólfsdóttir and Jóhannsdóttir 2018), and the local
Performative Activism and Activist Performance: Young People Engaging in Decolonial… 151
South African movement that emerged and has grown significantly from 2018 as
#totalshutdown8 serve as key moments of transnational and locally-based interven-
tions at large scale public levels against sexual harassment and violence. The latter
South African based movement, which began at the start of what has come to be
known as women’s month (with August 9th as National Women’s Day) in 2018,
called for all womxn to ‘shut down’ (boycott work, shops, and so on) and join a
mass march to parliament, and serves as a significant example of current use of
social media in mobilization for social justice. Such movements, while not
uncontested,9 together arguably serve community psychological goals of both psy-
cho-education and consciousness-raising as well as facilitating more subjective
healing through recognition, identification with others, safety, belonging and col-
lectivity. While often operating in a context that is not a geographically, geopoliti-
cally or culturally-based community but a ‘virtual community’ on the basis of
shared or similar violences, injustices or threats, these interventions serve to create
a virtual and at times material (for example during marches) ‘safe space’ similar to
other forms of community psychological interventions and research on sexual vio-
lence (see for example, Campbell et al. 2004; Lichty et al. 2018).
8
See https://www.facebook.com/WomenProtestSA/.
9
While representing a transnational example of women’s solidarity, #MeToo also raises intersec-
tional inequalities since the campaign has tended to be driven by global northern white womxn,
while many of those in global southern and other marginalized, less resourced parts of the world
have not been.
152 T. Shefer
References
Adams, G., Dobles, I., Gómez, L. H., Kurtiş, T., & Molina, L. E. (2015). Decolonizing psycho-
logical science: Introduction to the special thematic section. Journal of Social and Political
Psychology, 3(1), 213–238.
Bennett, J., Gouws, A., Kritzinger, A., Hames, A., & Tidimane, C. (2007). “Gender is over”:
Researching the implementation of sexual harassment policies in southern African higher edu-
cation. Feminist Africa, 8, 83–104.
Blanco, M. (2017). Out of this world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXWQT486_E
Accesssed 5 Feb 2019.
Boonzaier, F. (2017). The life and death of Anene Booysen: Colonial discourse, gender-based vio-
lence and media representations. South Africa Journal of Psychology, 47(4), 470–481.
Boonzaier, F., & van Niekerk, T. (2019). Introducing decolonial feminist community psychol-
ogy. In F. Boonzaier & T. van Niekerk (Eds.), Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology
(pp. 1–10). Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Buikema, R. (2016). Academy, art and activism. Paper presented at RINGS (International Research
Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies) conference 2016: The geopolitics of
gender studies (pp. 16–18). Cape Town: Cornerstone Institute. November 2016.
Buikema, R. (2017). Revoltes in de Cultuurkritiek. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Campbell, R., Sefl, T., Wasco, S. M., & Ahrens, C. E. (2004). Doing community research with-
out a community: Creating safe space for rape survivors. American Journal of Community
Psychology, 33(3/4), 253–261.
Collins, A. (2014). Faceless bureaucracy?: The challenges of gender-based violence and practices
of care in higher education. In V. Reddy, S. Meyer, T. Shefer, & T. Meyiwa (Eds.), Care in
context: Transnational gender perspectives (pp. 282–304). Cape Town: HSRC.
Dosekun, S. (2007). Defending feminism in Africa. Postamble, 3(1), 41–47.
Dosekun, S. (2013). “Rape is a huge issue in this country”: discursive constructions of the rape
crisis in South Africa. Feminism and Psychology, 23(4), 517–535.
Duncan, N., Bowman, B., Naidoo, A., Pillay, J., & Roos, V. (2015). Community psychology:
Analysis, context and action. Cape Town: Juta.
Gouws, A. (2016). Young women in the “decolonizing project” in South Africa: from subaltern to
intersectional feminism. Paper presented at the Nordic Africa Days Conference 2016, Uppsala,
23–25 September.
Gouws, A. (2017). Feminist intersectionality and the matrix of domination in South Africa.
Agenda, 31(1), 19–27.
Gqola, P. (2015). Rape: A South African nightmare. Auckland Park: MfBooks Joburg.
Gray van Heerden, C. (2018). #Itmustallfall, or, pedagogy for a people to come. In Bozalek, V.,
Braidotti, R., Shefer, T. &., Zembylas, M. (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies in higher educa-
tion: Critical posthumanist and new feminist materialist perspectives (pp. 15–30). London:
Bloomsbury.
Hames, M. (2009). ‘Let us burn the house down!’ Violence against women in the higher education
environment. Agenda, 23(80), 42–46.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Hubbard, P. (2009). The Zimbabwe birds: Interpretation and symbolism. Honeyguide, 55(2),
109–116.
Huffman, T. N. (1987). Symbols in stone: Unravelling the mystery of great Zimbabwe.
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Hussen, T. S. (2018). ICTs, social media and feminist activism: #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, and
#RUReferenceList movement in South Africa. In T. Shefer, J. Hearn, K. Ratele, & F. Boonzaier
(Eds.), Engaging youth in activism, research and pedagogical praxis: Transnational and inter-
sectional perspectives on gender, sex, and race (pp. 199–214). New York/London: Routledge.
154 T. Shefer
A gendered identity, 95
Abortion counselling, 13, 14, 23, 24 Islamic ideology, 104, 105
Activism, 3, 8 multiple positionalities and power, 96
Activist performance, 8 and non-muslims, 102–104
African feminisms, 14, 17, 18, 61 paternalistic and anti-Muslim nationalism,
See also Narrative-discursive method 97
American Psychological Association (APA), 2 physical expressions, religious identity, 97
Andean women’s engagement plural identities, 96
organising-as-women power and subjectivity approach, 101
development, 34, 35 race and racism, 96
foreign community, 33, 34 racial discrimination, 96
violence against women and resistance, self-identified, 101
35–38 social capital and mobility, 101
women’s knitting association, 33 social identities, 102
Anti-capitalist, 61 South African and global context, 95
Anti-imperialist, 62 young adulthood, 101
Anti-patriarchal, 61
Anti-racist, 62
Apartheid patriarchy, 51, 54 B
Australian Muslim Women Borderlands theory, 7, 101
academic literature, 97, 98
act of reflexivity, 96
Australia nationalism, 96 C
colonial discourses and practices, 96, 97 Co-authorship, 62–64, 73–74
colonial representation, 97 Colonialism, 2, 4, 43
community psychology, 96 Coloniality of power, 135
contemporary colonial discourses, 97 Colonial patriarchy, 43, 51, 54, 55
conversational interviewing, 101 Coming-to-voice, 82, 83
decolonial community psychology, 98, 99 The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation,
decolonial feminist approach, 99–101 30
diverse ethnic groups, 97 Community psychology
ethnic identity position, 97 definition, 2
feminine sexuality, 105 heterogeneity, 3
functionality and political significance, 102 individuals’ embeddedness, 13
gendered boundaries, 106 socio-historical power relations, 13