How township women turn challenges into opportunity

A UKZN lecturer has used her doctoral studies to draw attention to the challenges South African women experience every day.

Last week Dr Chantal Juanita Christopher graduated with a PhD in Occupational Therapy during the university’s spring graduation ceremony.

Her dissertation, titled "(Un)becoming Re-creation - Exploring ‘Coloured’ Women’s Suffocation and Rejuvenation within a KwaZulu-Natal Township: A Critical Feminist Ethnography" explored the experiences of women in the Mariannridge township, using critical feminist ethnography to address issues of social justice.

She said the study provided a platform for the participants, who were also co-researchers, to share and reflect on their life experiences through dialogue, thereby creating a space where they could all work together to make sense of what was happening, the reasons behind it and how to address it. It also showcased their resilience.

“In our society, most of women's pain goes unremarked and unseen. We can't wait or assume it will unravel to a degree that women won't cope or become socially and occupationally non-functioning. We have to say women deserve our attention so that they too can say, ah, things have just shifted.”

Christopher said despite the title of her study the narratives were common in communities across the country. However, she chose to conduct her investigation in the Mariannridge community because the university has been active there for many years.

She said her study highlighted the “matrix of oppression” faced by these women, and revealed how their marginalised identities and daily struggles became powerful forms of resistance, counterintuitively granting them a sense of agency and belonging.

“You know that women continue, post-apartheid, to be carrying those same burdens, if not more now, because we didn't really move,” she said.

Christopher said the patriarchy that women have to deal with is part of the apartheid legacy. She says they’ve inherited their occupations, not only through a gendered lens, but through places, practices and people. “And that is also linked then, unfortunately, to conditions like our education, the Group Areas Act, how our culture has evolved and apartheid,” she said.

Christopher says that “unbecoming” also referred to the “psychodynamic unravelling” where women have to figure out who they are, how they became those people, what felt comfortable and what would they take forward. This included their predominant role as carers of society and particularly children.

“There are these oppressions. A lot of it is internal, it is through the ideas and thoughts. It is through culture and all of these things. But how do they reframe it then and then move into an openness to say, okay, I'm beginning to be reconciled to this, it is where I find myself. This is how life is,” she said.

Christopher refers to this as occupations of resistance where women do things in spite of or in keeping with their marginalised identities. She says they use those occupations of resistance to gather strength, to live another day and to stand up to the conditions they must face.

“ And so I'm saying in my PhD then, if we create this unbecoming and the reflective space and women begin to reconcile these harrowing streams of history, their personal experiences, socio-cultural drivers of behaviour that they then have opportunities to recreate.That they themselves become the protagonists in their story.” Christopher believes that by working through these systemic oppressions and experiences, and by understanding why things are happening, they can turn it into new opportunities and find new ways of doing things.