Gender, resilience and resistance: South Africa’s Hleketani Community Garden

Vibert, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/02589001.2016.1202508

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Most of the world's poor are 'rural', a fact that tracks with the paradox that a majority of the world's malnourished are farmers; these figures are gendered, given that in South Africa, for instance, more than half of small-scale farmers are women (World Bank 2007; Ramisch 2017; Hall and Kepe 2017). Rural people's actions are often imagined (if imagined at all) to fall below an implicit threshold for consideration as 'political'a set of assumptions and practices that are profoundly gendered, classed, and racialised, and that have rendered invisible the citizenship activities of a majority of the world's population, many of them women (Napoleon and Friedland 2016, 213;Bell 2007;Vibert 2016). Drawing on oral historical evidence from the latter apartheid era and the democratic period (roughly 1970 to the present), this article demonstrates that rural lives in South Africa are widely experienced as mobile, dynamic, and translocal.…”

Section: Translocal Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the village, plots are small and some of those foods are now just memories. Overreliance on maize meal, often purchased, contributed to the nutrition crisis that spurred the women to start their cooperative farm in the early 1990s (Vibert 2016;Vibert and Welsh 2017).…”

Section: Mobility 1: the Linesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the village, Rose believed her girls would 'grow well, being responsible for themselves,' learning self-discipline and positive cultural values. These women's lives illuminate gendered patterns of mobility that have persisted for decades, quickened since the end of apartheid, and involve people, ideas, and material goods in an ongoing search for household wellbeing (Bozzoli 1991;Camlin, Snow, and Hosegood 2014;Vibert 2016).…”

Section: Mobility 2: Women's Movements Under Apartheidmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

Vibert

2020

Politikon

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Rural spaces in South Africa remain crucially important to the material, emotional, and cultural wellbeing of many South Africans, and many 'rural' lives have long been highly mobile and dynamic. Women in rural areas, in particular, provide diverse maintenance work that sustains translocal householdsentities that sprawl across rural, peri-urban, and urban space. This article situates South African mobilities, especially those of women, in the historical context of the past fifty years, exploring the changing nature of connections between rural and urban lives of Black South Africans through the lens of a village in a former 'homeland' in northeastern Limpopo Province. Whereas analyses tend to focus on migrants, often viewing rural people as immobile or out of step with modernity, the focus here is on those who remain principally rural yet maintain mobilities of diverse kinds. Rooted in the qualitative methods of oral history, social history, and gender history, the article provides a fine-grained analysis of rural households, the lives of those who remain in or return to rural areas, and rural contributions within translocal households and economies.

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Section: Translocal Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mobility 1: the Linesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mobility 2: Women's Movements Under Apartheidmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

Vibert

2020

Politikon

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“…In other words, gardens are good, bad or indifferent. The first presents the garden as a source of empowerment (Benz, 2016;Steinbrink, 2012) against a broad spectrum of negatively characterized forces, such as too little government (neoliberalism) (Vilbert, 2016), too much government (McVey et al, 2018), food insecurity (Baker, 2004;Gray et al, 2014;Murtagh, 2010), gender normativity (Ore, 2011;Parry et al, 2005), racism (Shinew et al, 2004) and even physical illness (Armstrong, 2000). Alternatively, critics depict a general tendency of disempowerment and impoverishment of the "urban underclass" 1 (Myrdal, 1965) in the neoliberal city (Allen and Guthman, 2006) that skirts the ultimate questions of capital and land redistribution (Borras, 2007;Holt-Gim enez and Wang, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification

Haskaj

2020

Environ Plan A

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Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute to the efforts to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment, forces that are rooted in what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries which underpin a host of power relations that are “given” and form the unquestioned framework of a given set of power relations. This is therefore a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space” by a disordering of one set of several sanctified oppositions which can be found in the space of the community garden. The article de-sanctifies space by exploring the historical context of the community garden in New York and Oakland California and posits that the work of the gardener is co-opted into a value regime by a process I call “conspicuous labor”. This process is similar to Veblen's conspicuous consumption except the value generated is not in modeling consumption but rather in emulating class patterns and re-configuring the urban poor as a productive, passive and pastoral.

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“…Many women spoke of the struggles of other women in their community, some of which they negatively attributed to the laziness or choices made by women themselves. Across the three groups of women I was told that "many women are not working" (see also Vibert 2016), that they only want to "stay in their houses" rather than participate in the community (Liza, WECCF). As Whitey, the deputy-committee leader in Hillview 2, told me,…”

Section: Exclusionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy for empowerment: the role of energy in women’s organising and empowerment in urban and peri-urban South Africa

Listo¹

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In feminist scholarship empowerment has been extensively theorised and critiqued, yet it has only recent emerged as a critical concept in energy and gender thinking. An emerging body of studies have begun to more critically theorise empowerment and the links with energy access, yet these studies give less emphasis to key aspects of empowerment as it is conceived by feminist scholars, including collectivity or community, process and social practice. In this thesis, I bring such elements into the conversation of energy, gender and empowerment, and so contribute to an ongoing tradition of feminist energy scholarship. The central aim is to explore the practices and experiences of women who are collectively organising to improve their energy systems, and the role of energy in the process of their empowerment. I do so in the context of urban and peri-urban contexts in South Africa, a country with its own tradition of gender-specialist and feminist researchers and advocates with a focus on energy. Specifically, I address: 1) How, and through what practices, are women collectively organising for better energy systems? 2) In what ways does organising for energy facilitate women's empowerment? 3) What role does energy play in transforming gendered identities and empowerment? My orientation is explicitly feminist and I am guided by a theoretical framework of feminist concepts, namely gender, empowerment and power. I hold the notion of empowerment with complexity, embracing the significant debates which underpin its theorisation. I investigate three case studies in urban and peri-urban South Africa, of organised groups of self-identifying women, such as people's movements, or women's committees, which are active at a local community level and supported by external NGOs. I have taken a feminist methodological approach, with the intention of transformative research practice and attention to both academic and political rigour. This included qualitative data collection methods, adapting a combination of narrative methods such as Oral History Interviews, and Collective Narrative Practice methods with both women and the NGOs to draw out stories and experiences of women as individuals and as collectives. I found that energy, rather than being a causal factor, is intertwined with broader societal institutions and norms which drive the conditions gendered disempowerment and inequality. Equally, energy is intertwined with femininities, conceived as shared expressions gender. In analysing the role of NGO interventions in shaping women's experiences of collective empowerment, I unearthed the significant influence of community practice in enabling empowerment. Finally, I examined women's experiences of empowerment, and the factors they identified as crucial to increasing their power. I found that while the materiality of energy played a role in this process, equally significant were intangible resources such as relationships, learning and theory, and skills, and in these contexts energy's immaterial nature was also significant. In examin...

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Gender, resilience and resistance: South Africa’s Hleketani Community Garden

Cited by 17 publications

References 19 publications

Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970–2020

(Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification

Energy for empowerment: the role of energy in women’s organising and empowerment in urban and peri-urban South Africa

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