Family dynamics are evolving globally, influenced by factors such as parental absence, yet the impact of maternal absence remains underexplored, particularly in the South African context. This study aimed to examine how the absence of biological mothers shapes family dynamics and the experiences of young women. A qualitative research design was employed, with semi-structured interviews conducted among 20 young women aged 20-25 years residing in a South African township. Participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling techniques to ensure alignment with the study criteria. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed several key ways in which maternal absence affects family life. These included unstable living arrangements, the absence of a maternal role model, and limited guidance and emotional support during critical developmental stages. Young women who grew up without mothers often faced additional challenges when assuming early motherhood themselves, including heightened caregiving responsibilities, financial strain, and limited social support, which in turn influenced household functioning and intergenerational relationships. The findings underscore the pivotal role of maternal presence in fostering family stability and supporting young women's development. It is recommended that policymakers and social service providers implement targeted support interventions for young mothers experiencing maternal absence. Such interventions could include mentorship programmes, parenting support initiatives, and community-based networks that provide guidance, emotional support, and resources to mitigate the social and developmental consequences of maternal absence. By addressing these gaps, South African families can be better supported, ultimately strengthening family resilience and improving outcomes for children and young mothers.
A swipe of nail polish can spark a flood of judgement, humour, and unexpected solidarity on TikTok. Focusing on responses to men in the South African context who post videos with painted nails, the article explores how masculinity is policed, negotiated, and sometimes conditionally affirmed within everyday platform discourse. The analysis is grounded in reflexive digital field observation and an analytic autoethnographic component. Structured memos captured during repeated observations of comment sections, alongside reflexive notes that document the author's own adoption of nail painting, has shaped the research questions and interpretative lens. Using a thematic, discourse-oriented approach, five recurring patterns emerge: (1) "real man" respectability policing; (2) sexual labelling and homophobic shortcutting; (3) humour/banter as plausibly deniable ridicule; (4) aesthetic and trend-based legitimation that enables conditional permission; and (5) affirmation and ally praise that expands visibility while often retaining normative boundaries. Rather than claiming linear social transformation, the article argues that these interactions reveal ongoing boundary work around acceptable masculinity in a public platform, where visibility simultaneously invites support and intensifies policing. Ethical harm minimisation is addressed through non-traceable reporting practices, including paraphrase and the avoidance of identifying details.
This article adopts the lived citizenship analytical framework and employs a qualitative case-study methodology to examine the experiences of the second-generation non-pastoral Fulanis and their descendants at Agogo in the southern part of Ghana. The aim, extending beyond Ghana and informing other Global South contexts, is to understand the complex processes of informal and lived citizen-making, exploring how marginalised groups, particularly ethnic minorities who have challenges with formal recognition, construct, negotiate and enact citizenship. The study problematises and critiques post-colonial (formal) citizenship frameworks in most African states shaped by colonial epistemic and institutional legacies of constructed arbitrary identities that exclude long-settled migrants and ethnic minorities. Such state-centric conceptions fail to capture the diverse ways differentiated groups experience and perform citizenship. Thus, shifting the focus from legal status, institutional belonging and abstract legal frameworks to lived realities of everyday experiences and certain mundane practices, I argue that citizenship is not always a matter of formal arrangements of belonging and performance in institutionalised settings. More importantly, it is lived, built and enacted in non-institutionalised spaces, enabling people to live together and cooperate in an orderly social life. The findings reveal that the Fulanis construct citizenship by asserting birth and residency; integration into Agogo's agricultural economy; land acquisition and engagement in livelihoods; socio-cultural and economic relational practices; and subjective feelings of deep connections with other dominant groups and societal acceptance.
Pronouns, particularly gender-expansive pronouns like the singular "they", have become prominent points of contestation in public discourse. Right-wing public and political figures have fuelled the furore over pronouns as they rely on traditionalist notions of the gender binary to deny the legitimacy of (a)gender diversity and trans identities. At the same time, queer-trans scholars, activists, and (teacher) educators also use pronouns to trouble cisheteronormative spaces and interactions in complex ways and with variable effects. In this article, we draw on the work of Sarah Ahmed to argue that pronouns work as (dis-/re-)orientation devices with implications for doing queer critical literacies in teacher/higher education. Our discussion brings into conversation public discourses around pronouns and critical reflection on duoethnographic moments by the authors. First, we explore the contestation around pronouns on social media, particularly utterances by public figures and users on Twitter/X that seek to perpetuate cisheteronormativity but instead can enable queer critical approaches. Second, we present autoethnographic reflections about how declaring our pronouns and using pronouns in gender-expansive ways in our work as teacher educators can disrupt cisheteronormativity. As a function of a broader system of language and meaning-making, pronoun declarations are one dimension in maintaining, reproducing, disrupting, or transforming dominant ideologies of gender. As such, they then also contribute towards constructing the conditions for the inclusion and affirmation of (a)gender diversity where difference is represented positively in everyday ways, and normative assumptions about (a)gender identity are not taken for granted.
This is a critical examination of cisheteronormative beliefs and practices through the lens of the lived experiences of Vuyo, a transgender Xhosa man "oliwele" who is the twin of a cisgender male. Drawing upon an in-depth interview with Vuyo, we explore how cisgenderism and heteronormativity were reinforced as norms within his traditional Xhosa upbringing and community. We further examine what impact this had on his sense of self and identity from a young age when he identified as male despite being assigned female at birth. Vuyo's narrative highlights the immense challenges, stigma and ostracization faced by those who transgress cisheteronormative expectations. Simultaneously it points to the resilience, resistance and self-determination required to live authentically. This case study troubles dominant assumptions about the naturalness and immutability of the gender binary. The study further illuminates the regulatory power of cultural rituals and practices in enforcing compulsory cisnormativity and heteronormativity. Vuyo's journey of becoming a man through and against the backdrop of his twin brother's seamless alignment with Xhosa manhood reveals the complex intersections of gender identity, kinship, culture and spirituality. His story captures the paradoxical erasure and animation of his masculinity through the death of his cisgender twin and the cultural inheritance of the male spirit. This article advances theoretical and empirical knowledge on the lived realities of transgender subjectivities within an African socio-cultural context and the critical importance of troubling cisheteronormativity in all its manifestations.
Foregrounding the narrative of a trans youth in a conservative area of the United States, this article explores how the theoretical and practical implications enmeshed in sonic ethnographic work and curriculum theorizing are in relation to what the author calls critical consent curricula. The author argues that these curricula should be embedded across systems of schooling and are but one way to interrupt educational necropolitics that pervade every aspect of young people's experiences in schools. Violence that emerges from necropolitical norms often results in daily sucker punches that resonate across and against minoritized youth's ways of being, knowing, and doing. By listening deeply to Ray's narrative, this paper is a call to find ways to resist and refuse violence through consent curricula so that queer futurities become the sonic grounds that undergird everyday experiences in school.
Given that the cishetero-identifying body signifies corporal, gendered, and sexualized features (i.e. an able-bodied and heterosexual male or female body), disabled genders and sexualities (e.g. queer disabled men) often remain invisible and excluded to the dominant body (i.e. the able-bodied, catheter body). This paper aimed to explore how cisheteronormativity plays a role in the performances of visually impaired men and women (i.e. those with low to complete vision loss). A total of 13 (8 female and 5 male) visually impaired individuals with heterosexual and 2 queer identities were conveniently sampled and interviewed individually. Intersectionality and performativity theory underpinned this study, while the data generated were analysed thematically. To trouble notions of normalcy (i.e. falling outside the norm of the able body), all the visually impaired individuals problematized the over-depictions of able-bondedness (i.e. that the custody is always an able-bodied body), resulting in hyper-ableism (i.e. the need to over-perform to be equal). To trouble notions of normative sexualities and desires, the heterosexual-identifying visually impaired men and women felt the need to bolster their sexual desirability via hyper-femininity and -masculinity (i.e. that the disabled body can be sexual too). While the queer disabled men expressed the need to increase their visibility in an already minority group (i.e. that the disabled body is not genderless or always heterosexual), the paper argues for the need to unmask these intersecting vulnerabilities by revealing the role of cisheteronormativity as contributing to compulsory able-bodiedness, hyper-ableism, and compulsory heterosexuality. Recommendations for awareness, advocacy, and allyship are provided.
In this powerful and thought-provoking dialogue, Jabu Pereira and zethu Matebeni confront the complexities of identity, belonging, and resilience within the academic landscape of South Africa. As they reflect on their shared journey over the past three decades, they delve into the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, challenging the oppressive narratives that have historically marginalized queer voices. This conversation is not just an exploration of personal experiences; it is a clarion call for recognition, representation, and the reclamation of space in a society that often seeks to erase the existence of those who defy normative constructs. With raw honesty and intellectual rigor, Pereira and Matebeni invite us to reconsider what it means to navigate a world that is both hostile and constantly transforming, urging us to embrace our identities and assert our rightful place in the ongoing struggle for liberation and justice. The conversation took place at Nelson Mandela University on 28 June 2024, with an audience. This is an edited, shortened version of the conversation.
The South African historical research proves that military training camps during apartheid were sites of cisheteronormativity, which recognised cisgender heterosexual men and informed the ill-treatment of gay male recruits who were exposed to harsh conversion therapies. Due to limited research, little is known about gay male soldiers and police officers' encounters with cisheteronormative occupational cultures in their training experiences post-1994. This study explores how cisheteronormativity manifests and shapes Black gay men's negotiation of sexual identity disclosure, agency, and belonging in the male-dominated military and police training spaces. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with 24 Black gay soldiers and police officers who underwent police and military training, the study established that Black gay male soldiers and police officers are often propelled by cisheteronormative ideologies and occupational cultures in training spaces to carefully negotiate their sexual identities. The findings reveal that acceptance and tolerance in these contexts is conditional, often dependent on concealment, silence, or conformity, while disclosure and visibility risked exclusion but also enabled resistance and redefined belonging. The findings contribute to our knowledge of how cisheteronormative occupational cultures operate as oppressive forces, especially within the South African military and police training spaces, and how Black gay men's agency challenges and destabilises them, exposing the fragility of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities. Consequently, I argue that it is necessary to challenge cisheteronormative ideologies and heteronormative male occupational cultures in order to promote and achieve the social inclusion and integration of Black gay men, in such military and police training spaces as explored in this study.
The #MenAreTrash digital feminist activism (DFA) emerged on South African social media platforms as a powerful protest discourse against the high rates of violence against women (VAW), rape and femicide. However, #MenAreTrash was met with resistance in the form of counter-discourses. While existing research provides valuable insights into the challenges encountered by DFA, it has not sufficiently critically analysed a spectrum of resistance against online feminist discourse. Current research often reductively frames such resistance as fundamentally anti-feminist and misogynist. Therefore, this paper draws on counter-discourse theory to understand and analyse the complex nature of resistance towards the #MenAreTrash DFA. Methodologically, the paper employs qualitative, in-depth interviews and secondary data sources. The findings reveal that counter-discourses acknowledge the pervasiveness of VAW, yet challenge the discourse of #MenAreTrash, which was viewed as overly generalising and separatist, thereby resulting in alienation, psychological effects on men and reduced impact. Furthermore, counter-discourses emphasised the need for DFA to move away from generalising language like "men are trash" towards strategies centred on digital pedagogy and communicative action. Therefore, the findings of this paper suggest that future feminist initiatives could garner broader support and enhance their effectiveness by prioritising constructive approaches for engaging men rather than positioning them solely as adversaries.
Migration is often framed as a journey of opportunity, but for undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa, such imaginaries are undermined by the structural precarity of everyday life, marked by insecure work, deportability, and social exclusion. This paper examines how migrants strategically navigate this contradiction by constructing counter-narratives of success to maintain kin recognition and social legitimacy at home. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eMalahleni, the study explores how undocumented migrants selectively curate their self-presentation through aesthetic displays of fashionable clothing, fancy gadgets, and social media performances, while suppressing accounts of hardship. These sanitized accounts, often embellished with falsehoods, challenge the dominant discourse of migrant failure, exemplified by the metaphor of nhava izere mhepo (a bag full of air), and rework the moral economy of migration within transnational kinship networks. This paper argues that these practices of (mis)representation are not merely deceptive but constitute relational strategies of dignity preservation, status work, and affective labour under conditions of legal and economic marginality. By tracing how migrants manage visibility to audiences back home, the paper contributes to wider debates on undocumented migrancy, moral economies, and the politics of self presentation in post-apartheid South Africa.
This paper examines how female heterosexual learners negotiate cisheteronormativity within South African school contexts. Using a qualitative design, we draw on two single-sex focus groups with girls aged 15-17 in two KwaZulu-Natal high schools. Cisheteronormativity is utilised as a conceptual lens to show how gendered norms naturalise a sex/gender binary and privilege heterosexuality while also opening avenues for contestation. The findings illustrate how support for gender and sexual diversity is produced in the context of girls' reference to constitutional equality, religious and moral frames, as well as through school rituals like the matric dance. However, inclusion coexists with the reproduction of cisheteronormative binaries suggesting that acceptance of sexual diversity is partial and precarious. The paper also draws attention to the policing of boys' masculinity and sexuality through peer surveillance, showing how masculinity is especially under pressure in the context of gender-nonconforming conduct. Despite these constraints, participants propose strategies that deal with cisheteronormativity through learner-led support groups, school counsellors, comprehensive sexuality education, and partnerships with community organisations. We conclude the paper with implications for advancing sexual diversity and justice in South African schools.
