Women who strike
Women protesters during recent public service strike
Victorine Ntambo reflects on popular perceptions of the recent public service strike and the gender dimension of the protests.
We call them sisters. A very soothing title for a profession made up of a handsome number of women. Nurses all over the world – and particularly in South Africa where hospitals are under-staffed – work long, difficult hours, yet they are underpaid. The government and many people think nurses’ rewards should lie in being of service to others. At the same time, teachers enjoy their jobs because they took an oath to empower our children and even some grown-ups too. Their working conditions are terrible and most of them do not have offices. They do most of their administrative jobs from their homes; houses that are often in a terrible condition. But the government and many non-teachers think they do not have the right to decent salaries and housing allowances.
During the recent public service strike in South Africa, newspaper images and television screens were filled with images of groups of women toyi-toying in response to the government’s refusal to an 8% salary increase. These groups comprised teachers and nurses, alongside their public sector colleagues. The public has responded with disappointment and anger, especially where demonstrations have turned violent and because schooling and medical services have been disrupted. Because to them, teachers and nurses are lucky to have jobs and they knew what they were letting themselves in for when choosing the profession.
I do not write to condone violence nor the disruption of classes and the treatment of patients and non-strikers. I will never do that because the strikers have civil rights. What they do not seem to remember though is that while it is everyone’s democratic right to strike, it is also everyone’s democratic right to decide not to strike. As such, it becomes unacceptable to threaten or intimidate people who make either decision.
Let us assume that teachers are in this profession because of their call to educate the nation while nurses are angels of mercy. It is assumed that women are by nature educators and nurturers because amongst other things, they often come to the aid of those in need for nothing in return. When teachers and nurses go on strike, it seems to touch a raw nerve in our country’s consciousness because it is similar to a mother who goes on strike, and refuses to nurture the family or do any housework until she gets some recognition for it. When people protest to violent acts by women, it is because the picture painted in our minds seems like that of mothers who abandon their homes and children to go to war. Images of violent women during strikes evoke horror sights.
Teachers’ unions, nurses’ unions and COSATU have all been very vocal in stating that compassion does not pay the bills at the end of every month. In fact one striker stated on television news that they (educators) are the ones who make the directors and ministers of government who they are. I guess on the other side of the coin, nurses put forward a similar argument. Teachers and nurses are expected to give everything, and get very little in return for it. Loyalty and care is a two-way street, isn’t it? The government should be able to give what it expects to take.
Is it right for me to ask why the demand of these teachers and nurses has to be so irrelevant that the strike has to result to violence? Looking at the gender composition of these two professions and of the service profession in general, I am tempted to state that its employees find themselves at the very bottom of the public service pay scale because about 80% of the teachers in this country are women. The figure for nurses is possibly higher. In my opinion, these women should be paid more for working in the frontlines of education and social care, for dealing with children’s emotional and social challenges, for being the parents to our children during the day, for touching blood, bedpans, dying patients and for being in the front lines of overworked and stressed principals, head teachers, doctors, midwives and other specialists.
I am not for a moment denying that you find lazy, inefficient and disinterested teachers and nurses who are insufficiently trained and have bad attitudes, just like in every single profession. In fact the point I make in this article is that the responsibility for caring for patients in state schools and hospitals is that of the government. That the government has to create the kind of scenario in which teachers and nurses have the right to office space, equipment, expertise, support, financial encouragement, and other working conditions in order to do their jobs. Otherwise, the government will be failing both the teachers, nurses and the citizens. People now blame the teachers and nurses whose frustration has reached boiling point. This, in my view, is blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator.
The semiotics of fashion: identity and subcultures in South Africa
Lethabo Dibetso
If you were to define identity, would it be your sense of style, the people you hang out with, the way you talk or more? What do you think….? Drawing upon his current research on Ama Kip Kip and Smarteez, Lethabo Dibetso offers an analysis.
The cultural settings in which we are born and come to maturity influence our behaviour but that does not mean that humans are robbed of individuality or free will (Giddens; 2001: 29). The latter two concepts are central to my research on the Smarteez and Ama Kip Kip ‘fanatics’. Style is a powerful statement of self-identity/individuality. According to Widdicombe and Wooftitt (1995: 17), style enables the young working-class person to achieve an image that they cannot achieve in reality.
Through style, individuals are able to live outside, what Giddens (2000: 30) calls, our ‘traditional signposts’. This refers to spaces that confine individuals from creating and recreating their identities. Brake (1985: 11) notes in his book that the symbolic use of style allows subcultural groups to distinguish themselves from other spaces and other groups. He states that through style several indicators are raised. It expresses a degree of commitment to the subculture, and it indicates membership of a specific subculture which by its very appearance disregards or attacks dominant values). Subcultural styles, then, can be seen as symbolic resources in the young person’s resistances against for example societal inequalities. Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995: 17) give an example of the ‘teddy boys’ appropriation of an upper-class style, in the form of Edwardian dress coats, they ‘covered the gap’ between the implicated lifestyle and their largely manual, unskilled, low-status real careers and life chances.
For the Smarteez, nerdy sunglasses and unconventional hairstyles are signature, hereby subverting all conventional notions of what constitutes appropriate dress. Style is usually a principal defining feature of youthful subcultures (Brake 1985: 12). It is crucial to note, however, that it is not the specific clothes and possessions of objects in themselves that make style. Instead, it is through the process of stylisation that style is conceived. The concept stylisation refers to “the active organisation of objects with activities and outlooks, which produce an organised group-identity in the form and shape of coherent and distinctive way of being-in –the-world” (Widdicombe and Wooftitt 1995: 17). In her work, Sarah Nuttall (2003: 234-240) explores the notion of ‘self-stylisation’ in the context of Y culture in Rosebank, Johannesburg, increasingly also known as ‘loxion kulcha’ (‘loxion’ being a rescripting of the word ‘location’). This term helps us analyse Y culture, even though the location as well as the class vectors of the latter are poles apart. Because Y culture is embraced by urban black youths – a post apartheid generation of black teenagers who have attended multiracial (model C) schools – as well as many who have been to exclusively township schools. The kinds of self-stylisation that Y culture gives rise to mark important shifts in the making of subjectivities in the public sphere.
Whereas until the early 1990s, the relationship between self and ‘community’ and the broader political and economic conditions tended to frame public conception of self, post-apartheid youth culture has increasingly revealed along with global youth culture a greater attention to, and articulation of, processes of self-fashioning as artful, aesthetic, and deeply embedded in practices of imagination and in the elaboration of ‘lifestyles’ (Nuttall 2003: 238). Dress is the starting point of an exploration of self in society (Musangi 2009: 49). People have always needed a sense of who they are and a place to ground that sense of their identity in one or more of those institutions or activities of their lives: the church, their families and increasingly in the twentieth century their leisure and consumption (Grossberg et al 2006: 220).
Brake (1985: 12-13) further draws parallels between the use of style and fashion in subcultures by considering certain forms of analysis in linguistic theory. As much as we can draw meaning from a semiotic analysis of language, we can also see that the subcultural use of fashion is a rhetorical usage of formalised styles. Semiotics is central to understanding the process of meaning making (Grossberg et al 2006: 143). Through semiotics, we can understand the semiotic worth of clothing, how the appropriation of fashion by individuals can translate into meanings and express a form of resistance. To uncover the dimensions of signs, we must first attempt to unravel the codes through which meaning is organised, ‘connotative codes’ are particularly important (Hebdige 1979: 14). This is what I will continue to unmask in my current research on the self-styling of Ama Kip Kip and Smarteez. Watch this space!