Defending our shared humanity
WHAT I do for a living is more than a job to me. It allows me to engage theoretically and creatively with aspects of collaborative teaching and learning and with research into critical social and gender issues.
It allows me an intellectual and activist engagement with issues I care about.
Being a woman in South Africa is, quite frankly, both liberating and incredibly disabling. Poised between constitutional freedoms and the most horrific gender-based violence and crimes against women and children, we are in many instances forced to live out our lives in (burglar-barred) cages and behind padlocked doors.
Women’s Day or Women’s Month means not much to me, actually. I am not a fan of isolating and highlighting any particular calendar period for issues that demand ongoing awareness.
Women in South Africa are challenged by multiple intersectional realities of gender, race and class within which they have to articulate and enact their chosen roles.
I have no fixed definition of success. It is a lived and fluidly changing experience of where we see ourselves in respect to where we want to be, or, said differently, who we see ourselves in relation to who we want to be.
One woman who has made a great impact onmy life is my mother. Although she was traditional, she raised me to be anything but traditional. Her strength and grace in the face of illness and incredible pain take me closest to what I consider sacred.
Feminism is, to me, in simple terms, a particular egalitarian way of understanding male and female relationships as being symmetrical and equal, with power not weighted towards any one gender. It is a recognition of the “human-ness” in all.
The greatest lesson I have learnt from a woman is from my mother. I have learnt that, just as the centre or eye of the storm is a space of calm, at the centre of pain is peace and stillness. It is not a lesson I have learnt fully; it is an ongoing lesson that I try to grasp — that pain is merely a state of being to be transcended.
Although the way women are portrayed in the media has become more diverse and more representative of the rich diversity in terms of who we are and how we look, there is, unfortunately, still a large commodification element in advertising.
Women who are strong have the strength and courage to literally change the world. Through both large and small acts of resistance, they chip away at structures that attempt to strip us of our humanity.
Dr Naidu is a University of KwaZulu-Natal social sciences anthropologist who specialises in gender and feminist studies