Coming out has historically been an important yet often very challenging process for LGBTQI + individuals to no longer conceal their sexual and/or gender identity. For those who identify as bisexual, the process of coming out has proven especially complicated. In the general knowledge field of sexual identity, bisexuality continues to be a misunderstood, under-researched sexual identity, and from that negative stigmas and discrimination (even within LGBTQI + spaces) have contributed to bisexuals not coming out even within the LGBTQI + community. However, the significance and necessity of coming out itself has come to be questioned, particularly by younger LGBTQI + people. From a PhD study conducted in Johannesburg with 23 self-identifying bisexual women, this paper critically considers the different perspectives on coming out of bisexual women. Using a narrative life-history approach through interviews with a sample of eight participants from the study, this paper looks at how bisexual women understand the significance of coming out and how this process has different meanings for different age groups. Findings show that there are vastly divergent perspectives, with some participants believing it remains essential, while others argue that the fluidity of their identities no longer requires the same sort of disclosure.
Stories about “Ben10” relationships between older women and their younger male lovers appear regularly in the Daily Sun, South Africa’s most popular tabloid newspaper. Daily Sun readers, who are typically township residents, engage vociferously over the rights and wrongs of such relationships on the tabloid’s Facebook page, and alternatively berate or support the older, working class women who feature in them. These women could be understood as “postfeminist” insofar as they are financially independent and sexually autonomous. Their actions echo those of the independent township women in the mid 20th century who, resisting patriarchal apartheid social engineering, brewed beer and rented rooms in order to assert their financial and sexual independence. In both cases, these women’s bold actions confront local hetero-patriarchal norms and call into question an ideal local patriarchal gender order. However, the meanings that are made by the readers of such women in Ben10 relationships today also reflect a social context characterised by a contestation over the meaning of rights, high rates of unemployment, gender-based violence and HIV, factors that curtail a premature diagnosis of postfeminist identity. Drawing on a textual analysis of several articles and their Facebook comments, we argue that any assessment of postfeminism in southern spaces must account for how historical and contextual factors such as these constrain the reach of global postfeminism.
Postfeminism is a neoliberal sensibility that locates femininity in the body, thereby imploring women to constantly labor on, monitor and discipline their bodies. This aesthetic labor is presented to women as freely chosen and empowering. Brazilian waxing is exemplary aesthetic labor directed at the self. Academic literature on aesthetic labor in general, and Brazilian waxing in particular, looks at white and middle-class women, as this category of women is considered the putative subject of postfeminism. Little attention is paid to racialized women from the global south who perform aesthetic labor on other women’s bodies in the global north. In this paper, I draw on my ethnographic study of two beauty salons in London run by South Asian women to argue that these South Asian beauticians are postfeminist subjects as well. The aim of challenging the putative subject of postfeminism, using the example of Brazilian waxing, is not merely to include South Asian women in the discourse, but to advance a transnational theorization of postfeminism. Such theorization, I demonstrate, leads to a better understanding of how postfeminism is implicated in global structures of power as well as the affective qualities of postfeminism including intimacy and disgust.
For many young black South African women, the competitive arena of social media offers access to significant social and cultural capital, which can be invaluable in the unequal context in which they live. In order to succeed in this high stakes environment young women carefully construct the identities and idealised selves that they present on platforms like Instagram. They display a lifestyle of glamorous consumption, showcasing exclusive brands and fashionable items and modifying and modelling themselves to fit a beauty ideal that emphasises youth, light skin, slender bodies and straight hair. As well as these physical features, young women on Instagram are also hyper-aware of the need to appear “authentic”: to have their online lives and selves appear natural, easy and free of artifice in order to further enhance their status as role models to other women. This article draws from in-depth interviews with 10 black South African “micro-celebrities.” It reveals the central role of authenticity in these young women's online performances of self, and considers the contradictory impulses that require them to both “feel” and “appear” real. Within the framework of existing hegemonic structures, these women appear to be exercising their freedom as neoliberal citizens within a post-feminist setting. Despite the promises of freedom, however, this article reveals the way in which their performances of selfhood are powerfully constrained by normative ideas about aspiration and success.
Stemming from a broader PhD project, this article argues that neoliberal post-feminist cultural sensibilities–entrenched in contemporary popular culture–about empowered, agentic and self-determining women, are regressive for the feminist advancement of gender-relational equality in the African context. To arrive at this conclusion, the central aim was to elucidate whether the gender-performative representations prioritised in the multimodal discourses of Afrobeats music videos are implicated in post-feminist sensibilities and if so, in what ways and to what effect? Given the continent’s richly diverse, yet largely heteropatriarchal, sociocultural formations, I argue that ideas about empowered, agentic and self-determining (black) African women are–based on the limited purview offered through the multimodal discourses of a small corpus of Afrobeats music videos–no more than sociocultural façades as opposed to gender-relational realities in our context. The article relied on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a total of nine music videos drawn from the PhD project’s larger corpus of 25 Afrobeats music videos, their accompanying song lyrics, as well as a selection of YouTube viewer comments extracted from the analysed music videos. In critically exploring the gender-relational depictions prioritised in the analysed music videos, I argue for the consideration of what I am coining “misogyrom”; a gender-relational cultural sensibility which, in tandem with a post-feminist sensibility partly undergirding the multimodal discourses of these music videos, effectively veil this popular musical genre’s evidently sexist and misogynistic undertones that subvert potentialities of empowered, agentic and self-determining black African women.