Destined to come to blows?: race and constructions of “rational-intellectual” masculinity ten years after apartheid
- Authors: Vincent, Louise
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141619 , vital:37990 , DOI: 10.1177/1097184X05277694
- Description: In 1994, a democratic government came to power in South Africa for the first time in the country's history. But political transition is never a single event or moment. Rather, it is a continuous process that faces setbacks and contradictions. One of the questions we might ask about a society in transition is to what extent its gender order has changed or is changing. The present paper sets out to read the country's transformation drama through the lens of contested conceptions of South African masculinity. The article is focused on one particular version of masculinity which it terms “rational-intellectual man,” and the argument is that a legacy of racism and the persistence of racialized modes of reasoning continue to marginalise black men from this and other powerful, high-status forms of hegemonic masculinity.
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Of no account?: South Africa's electoral system (non) debate
- Authors: Vincent, Louise
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141657 , vital:37994 , DOI: 10.1080/02589000500513796
- Description: Accountability can be summarised simply as ‘answerability’ (James and Hadland 2002:1) and is a vital cornerstone of representative democracy. Without accountability, an electorate, once having put into power a particular representative, has no recourse to explanations, justifications or reviews of how that person has performed and whether or not they have fulfilled the promises which secured their election in the first place. In a representative democracy mechanisms of accountability are necessarily multiple and must include both formal and informal dimensions. The electoral system is but one of these. Other key lynchpins in the accountability engine include the role of opposition parties, the committee system, the media, civil society, the courts, and what in South Africa are referred to, on the basis of the 1996 Constitution, as the ‘Chapter Nine Institutions’: the Public Protector, Human Rights Commission, Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, Commission for Gender Equality, Auditor-General, and the Electoral Commission.
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