Academic Identities: women on a South African landscape

Abstract

Drawing from theories of identity formation and feminist theories, this paper develops an account which is both structural and personal of the social construction of academic women's lives in a South African selling. Such discussion is necessary given the paucity of material on gender in South Africa, and timely in its comparative account of the shaping effects not only of gender, but also of race in the academy. Using life‐history interviews, the paper explores and begins to explain the marginalisation of women in South African universities where male and masculine carries greater cultural prestige, and where the gendered economy and gender divisions in private lives shape and constrain academic selves, but where race has been and is a central carrier of power. Using the words of the women, it seeks to unpick the seamless narration of the White, male, masculinist colonial university as a move towards a more inclusive and so more fully human account of aspects of life in South African universities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 55 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.