Diagrama de componentes

The birth of the ‘new’ South Africa (27 April 1994) have shifted social configurations. Identities are in the process of being renegotiated and cultural borders are being transgressed. While it

could be expected that the new political, economic and cultural situation in post-apartheid South Africa might render obsolete the old binaries of ‘self’ and ‘other’, opening up new possibilities and a variety of new themes, past oppositions have not completely disappeared. Material power relations weaken against a boundless reshaping of the cultural landscape.

Stuart Hall (1994: 393-395) contends that cultural identities can be seen as involved in a process of becoming rather than a state of being, if it is accepted that identities are not pre-given but come into being within representation. However, identity construction in post-apartheid South Africa does not only take place as creolisation¹⁵¹ or hybridity. Exclusionary notions of identity, based on race and ethnicity, are still operative among certain sectors of post-apartheid South African society. The present South African society still suffers from the legacy of an identity-assigning colonialism and racialism¹⁵² imposed by successive minority governments. (Zegeye 2001: 3)

South Africa cannot escape the era of accelerated globalisation that on the one hand impacts on the ways in which culture and identity are being conceptualised, and on the other, hegemonizes locally dominant political and societal discourses. This means that culture and identity have been privatised, commodified, branded and become a function of a distinct form of economic organisation, namely market capitalism, with profound impacts for forms of social and political order. The political and social changes that South Africa is undergoing can be viewed as mediated – by media in a broad sense, thereby including mass media, art and cultural expression.

But this mediation takes place within a complex and ever-changing set of power relations, both global and local. This process is further played out on a variety of fronts, ranging from the mass media and new media to mainstream art forms such as theatre or the urban aesthetics of graffiti art, poetry, intellectual property, and hip-hop, kwaito, television and drama etc.

151 Nuttall and Michael (2000) employ the term “creolisation” to describe the cultural dynamic of post-apartheid South Africa. Creolisation, they contend, is a process whereby individuals of different cultures, languages and religions are thrown together and invent a new language, Creole, a new culture, and a new social organisation.

152 Colonialism and racialism were powerful factors in forming the identities of Africans. Race in particular, and class, have been the master narratives of most South African texts in the post-apartheid context, and although there have been attempts to break with it, this seems easier said than done. While care should therefore be taken not to afford race and class over-determining importance, they remain key determinants in the formation of cultural and social identities and can therefore not be taken out of the equation completely. (Wasserman and Jacobs 2003: 17)

Lene Øverland (2003) examined the perpetuation of the dominant patriarchal ideology in advertising. She focused on advertising content and represents a snapshot case study of gender representations in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa¹⁵³, and asked the following important questions: do race and class mediate messages that reflect gender and sexual stereotypes? How do members of various communities read and reflect around gendered and sexual stereotypes¹⁵⁴ and what impact do these messages have on people’s lives?

Øverland’s findings are based on audience research and perception analysis conducted on the basis of focus groups organised by the Women’s Media Watch, a Cape Town-based media-monitoring organisation, during the second half of 2001. Further data was produced by studying advertisements in the popular magazines You, Drum and Huisgenoot in October 2002. The participants for the study came from diverse backgrounds in terms of race, class, sexuality, geographical location, occupation and educational background.

Working definitions of terminology such as “gender” and sexuality were dealt with as preliminary matters before the participants started analysing adverts. This also was done in order to create an understanding of sexuality in the media and the advertising industry. “Both male and female participants spoke mostly about how women were portrayed in adverts and how female sexuality was used to sell products and to communicate to people about how one should look to be cool or popular. They also questioned whether the human body was no more a private construction but rather a public satisfaction and utility maximising machine.” (Øverland 2003:

271)

Models in the advertisements seemed to represent role models; people do want to look like the people in the adverts, meaning white or exotic (in most cases). Further, women want to look naturally beautiful, and men smart, sophisticated and muscular. These are some of the

153 Given the fact that non-sexism and non-racism stand side by side in the South African Constitution, it is regrettable that critical voices are not able to theorise and argue race in relation to issues such as gender and sexuality. “However current South African advertisements that portray mostly white people, and more half-naked women than fully dressed women, do not seem to take notice of the Constitution anyway.” (Øverland 2003: 267).

Despite the formal commitment to gender rights (referred to in earlier chapters) in the new South African Constitution (which came into effect in 1996), gender is still being sidelined or seldom regarded as being as significant as race issues.

154 See e.g. Jordaan (2007: 351-370) for a responsible view on overcoming the problem of sexual stereotyping.

stereotypes, which also are closely related to body images reflected in South African advertising.

The groups critically studied several magazines, hunting for images of the non-stereotypical kind, but had to conclude that current advertising reveals containment, sexualisation, beautification and objectification of the white female body. It was observed that the female body was often offered to the reader purely as a spectacle object of sight and a visual commodity to be consumed.

Furthermore, more women than men were portrayed in adverts; however, when men were portrayed they were more often than women portrayed in dignifying positions.

The issue of sexual preference was also raised, especially in terms of the media demonising other sexual choices than the heterosexual. It was found that the dominant portrayals in South African advertising ‘normalise’ forms of passivity, dependency, beauty and domesticity for women, and control, strength, intelligence, exploitation and access to power for men. This portrayal contributes to the stereotypical, racial and gendered system where beauty, often represented by slim bodies, blond hair and blue eyes, can be viewed as a normalised discipline. (Øverland 2003:

272-273)

In some adverts it was found to be clearly evident that the underlying message seems to be that men look at women, and that women look at themselves. It seems that this has become a normalised action in a society which has defined masculinity as strong, active and in possession of the gaze, and femininity as weak, passive and to be looked at. “In other words some adverts reinforce common ideology, saying that a man will look at a woman when she adheres to the beauty ideals promoted, and maybe even invented, by the mainstream media.” (Øverland 2003:277)

In short: Media perceptions represent practices in which the construction of gender identity takes place. The characters in advertising function as textual constructions of possible modes of femininity and masculinity: as embodying versions of gendered subjectivity, these could be fantasy models of femininity and masculinity and hence offer opportunities to the advertising agencies to try out different subjectivities that might encourage the consumer to buy their

product. The challenge hence lies in getting the media to acknowledge the existence of the diversity of South African women and men¹⁵⁵.