Sitting pretty : white afrikaans women in postapartheid South Africa / Christi van der Westhuizen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Van der Westhuizen, Christi.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Afrikaners--Ethnic identity.

Afrikaners.

Racism--South Africa.

Racism.

South Africa.

Physical Description:

ix, 240 pages

Place of Publication:

Pietermaritzburg : University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2018.

Summary:

At the opening of South Africa's first democratic parliament in 1994, newly elected president Nelson Mandela issued a clarion call to an unlikely group: white Afrikaans women, who during apartheid occupied the ambivalent position of being both oppressor and oppressed. He conjured the memory of poet Ingrid Jonker as 'an Afrikaner and an African' who 'instructs that our endeavours must be about ... liberation'. More than two decades later, the question is: how have white Afrikaans speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy? With Afrikaner nationalism in disrepair, and official apartheid in demise, have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class? Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid, as an ethnic form of respectability, and the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation, as enduring icon. Issues of intersectionality, space, emotion and masculinity are also investigated. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 'We'll Put an Extra Little Sauce on': Ordentlikheid, and Ethnicised Respectability 22

Chapter 2 Be Good to Yourself to Be Good to (White) Others: Sarie Magazine's Technologies of Heterofeminity 62

Chapter 3 Silence, Service and White Sex: The Lives of the Volksmoeder 102

Chapter 4 'Keeping the Crown on His Head': The Patriarchal Overseer 149

Chapter 5 'There is a Certain Closure': Afrikaner Neo-Nationalist Enclaves 176.

ISBN:

1869143760

9781869143763

OCLC:

1015760259