(Re-)InventingHome Affairs: Feminist Solidarity and the South African Nation

Abstract

The South African-produced television show, Home Affairs, foregrounds the challenge of creating a united and homogenous notion of nation. The heterogeneous images of 9 female protagonists set within the discourse of nation-building draws attention to issues of equality and empowerment. However, these representations also expose ruptures within feminism, and the project of nationalism as feminist sensibility is often criticized as a betrayal of the nation. Locating these tensions within feminist and historical contexts, I argue Home Affairs allegorically represents the rebirth or rebuilding of the nation. However, although Home Affairs can be read as representative of the nation that valorizes middle-class values, it simultaneously demonstrates the competing interests of national solidarity and free-market forces that perpetuate socioeconomic and educational segregation.

Hussle and Motivate: An Afrocentric Understanding of Constitutive Rhetoric Toward Economic Empowerment in Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap Album

“…I utilize these songs as case studies to explore how Nipsey rhetorically empowers his listeners to embrace an identity toward economic and financial freedom. Further, this essay is interested in interrogating the ontological function of the “rhetoric of economic empowerment.” I define the rhetoric of economic empowerment as an active call to symbolically improve or grant access to economic freedom and liberation to establish an individual’s or community’s citizenship and agency (Bradfield, 2010; Fisher, 2016; Jones, 2017; Leaven, 2020; Stillion Southard, 2017). To clarify, rhetorical analysis (or criticism) is a “qualitative research method that is designed for the systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts for the purpose of understanding rhetorical processes” (Foss, 2017, p. 6).…”

Not “Simply the Breast”

“…By thinking "in terms of the relationships between stars and specific instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions in the culture," my analysis of celebrities who breastfeed focuses on myths of motherhood, femininity, and exoticism (Richard Dyer and Paul MacDonald 1979, 58). Feminist scholars in particular have established the necessity of illuminating dissonance in discursive formations of gender, race, sexuality, and class in transnational media texts (Shelley-Jean Bradfield 2010;Radhika Parameswaran 2011). Semiotic analysis of media representations of motherhood and celebrity reveal ways in which identities are constructed in oppositional terms (Jermyn 2008).…”