Sexualities Project - South Africa team

1. International Research Project on Pedagogies of Gender & Sexuality in Higher Education: South Africa Jane Bennett, Vasu Reddy & Lindiwe Bardill November 2006

2. 2 nd International Meeting: Researching the Incorporation of Sexualities in the Academic Curricula of Universalities in Asia, Africa & Latin America Project RESEARCH REPORT: International Research Project on Pedagogies of Gender and Sexuality in Higher Education: South Africa Jane Bennett (African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town) Vasu Reddy (Gender & Development Unit, Human Sciences Research Council & Gender Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal) Lindiwe Bardill (African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town)

3. Because I am not dead yet Whose body is told by the story: “ childcare,” “fire Manto!” “the challenge of pain”? Words are excellent things, full of energy, but dreadful, gone Do you always think like this? A forensic art, Telling the body when the body is Constantly under disappearance, Not a word

8. Schematic Overview: Activities and Tasks Planned and Completed (April 2006 – October 2006) Activity/date Achieved April: design of web-search research Research assistant contracted; design of project discussed Phase one: development of data-base April -- May: e-based introductory survey of faculty teaching sexuality/gender courses 17 websites identified; e-mail correspondence with 57 identified faculty initiated June – July: collation of course curricula; design of date-base template Analysis of websites ongoing; follow-up with 15 – 20 key faculty; design of data-base template July-August: preliminary analysis of data-base Write-up of preliminary analysis of courses August-September: pilot interviews with sample faculty; followed up by interviews with 16 more faculty members, from different universities/disciplines Interview schedules finalized; interviews begun; analysed August-October: interviews with sample students Interview schedule finalized; course selected for pilot student research; student data from 3 sources collated, analysed; decisions made on collection of new data from students in selected courses (4, in different disciplines); student evaluations and interviews completed; analysed September-October Interviews with university administrators in three key disciplines: Medicine, G/WS, Law September - October Integration of key Phase 3 material into Phase 1 findings for final report Uploading of data-base ongoing

9. Schematic Overview: Activities and Tasks Planned and Completed (April 2006 – October 2006) Contd. Phase two: development of autobiographical case-studies of sexuality/gender faculty March/April: SA Principal Researchers met, presented proposal to three different universities, in K/ZN; participants in case-studies selected and contracted; workshop facilitator contracted Completed as planned; with need to discuss relocation of Professor Reddy from University of KwaZulu/Natal to the Human Sciences Research Council May: writing case-study workshop – 3 days Evaluated as very successful by all participants; workshop transcripts transcribed as resources May – July: ongoing contact between case-study authors; resources collated, disseminated September: case-studies to be complete 4 case-studies complete Workshop for development of case-studies into book planned for 2007 Phase three: national workshop July/August: planning of national workshop, to bring faculty engaged though Phase One together; invitations sent; programme developed Completed, although some key faculty are not able to attend (Charles Ngwenya, from Law Faculty of University of Free State; Mary Mwaka from Public Health, University of Pretoria) September: workshop held in Cape Town Workshop held; report written, disseminated Oct/Nov Report drafted, discussed, presented for feedback Integration of all phases’ work into report for Puebla Workshop

18. Pedagogies within the courses offered: Some Faculty perspectives and overarching themes (engagement with Faculty voices created through different methods: (1) conventional semi-opened interviews with 20 people in different disciplines/universities based on pre-designed interview schedule; (2) discussion with 16 people in a two-day national workshop; (3) 4 ± 10 000 word autobiographical reflections) Creasing I want to age with grace Medical inspections/procedures make me scared This thematic is opening up academic space How has self-narrative in theorizing fared? Is my body’s sagging and sore showing in my face? Transformations bring both tension and release My students have beauty and grace they oft cant see Sexuality traces both violence and peace Where is the mind inside the body of me? Reading aids in Foucault, Xaba, Giddy… Will muddy and crease (poem created by a participant at the National Workshop in September 2006: a professor of history, looking at connections between history, epidemiology, sexuality and gender)

19. Where do you teach, what do you teach? X: I teach at the University of Pretoria. I teach one course in sexual and reproductive health to medical doctors who come from all over Africa to do an Masters in Public Health course. It is popular - they want a medical model. What’s the point? X: It’s unbelievably important. I take them to the brothel and the strip club and to other places, like glory holes and sex shops. I think what will make people change? I try to create experience for a personal shift to happen. I took them to gay pride, and students are willing to do these things because it is part of the programme. (interview with a Sexuality and Public Health lecturer)

24. Key moments in the workshop are represented through transcripts of the process: Is teaching gendered? K: For me it is gendered. It’s also sexual. V: we’re all human beings - and we cannot deny that as teachers we’re also sexual beings and we are turned on by some students but we have to also manage our levels of awareness of those things, we know where our boundaries are […] R: I feel that I’m raising children, it’s the closest I can get to being a mother […]

25. Key moments in the workshop are represented through transcripts of the process Contd. It would be very interesting for the autobiographical writing if you find that you have a central metaphor and explore that. Are there any thoughts here? J: (the image of being/becoming a suspension bridge): being the path and my sense of becoming capable of being stretched, suspending myself across all kinds of phenomena that are dangerous and unknown to me and to others: phenomena that can be summarized as the disappearance of the body, what it means for the body not to be coded or recognized as a political space. So I feel that my shape is about being a suspension bridge over or against that discursive presence of disappearance of the body that everywhere accounts for the meanings of racism, sexism, inhumanity, so it’s not a path, not a body, it’s an arch. K: What struck me is that I’ve done very little, I was quite surprised to have this come into my head but it is a map of central Africa to the bottom but it also turns out to be an opening flower which is quite surprising so these are routes and roads and paths. V: To describe the shape: it’s more like an onion that is constantly being peeled off – increasing space to breathe, I can see increasing freedoms in terms of my identity, my space, and position in various timelines within that unfolding … all of these lines that you see indicate layers and levels that are opening up … quite a delicious vegetable- that can make you cry- Yes, the positive and negative framed in that shape. I need to reflect on this more but I think the onion may be the metaphor. Certainly the shape that I see is very circular opening up. L: Mine is a moving octopus and I think it’s my teaching about sexuality and because it tends to be influenced by a variety of factors and relationships and its movement is influenced by the state/stage of the water, the tides, it depends on where we are and where I am in my personal and professional life – it doesn’t move straight but its relative stability is influenced by my own relationships. […] The octopus is messy and that’s how I’ve seen my teaching evolving in a messy way, it’s still messy, and I see myself as in the water, in the tides, because of the struggles that I still have to fight within myself as well as in various relationships.

26. Key moments in the workshop are represented through transcripts of the process Contd . How important is Location? What about place in respect of teaching? J: Location is so powerful in structuring both the possibility of engaging with what we are calling sexualities, personal or political, as part of one’s professional life, how one begins to think about the implications of location for what one has learned and for what one can therefore say, transmit to others, because one of the biggest struggles for me currently as a teacher, as a leaner, is to be in SA in relation to ideas that are embedded in me because of reading, or experience, that actually are northern in their genesis and have power/don’t have power […] V: How one works both in the university context giving a paper or lecture, as opposed to what you’d be saying in an activist context, in advocacy work [ …] vocabulary one uses, the position one takes, how you straddle the intellectual and political in different spaces where exchange of ideas and learning is taking place.