Polygamy in the recognition of Customary Marriages Act:
- Authors: Vincent, Louise
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141809 , vital:38006 , DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2009.9676275
- Description: The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (RCMA) 1998, recognises customary marriages which are “negotiated, celebrated or concluded according to any of the systems of indigenous African customary law which exist in South Africa” including polygamous marriages. The Act arises in the context of South Africa's Constitution which bans discrimination on grounds of culture and sexual orientation and allows for heterogeneity in its definitions of marriage and the family. A pluralist approach to family jurisprudence, however, is sometimes conceived of as setting up an irresolvable tension between the constitutional commitment to gender equality and protection for patriarchal prerogatives sanctioned by customary law. The fact that rights sometimes collide with one another is one of the reasons why it is impossible always to treat rights as absolute. When rights clash the question that arises is which of the rights that find themselves in tension with one another should give way and why?
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Putting the ‘T’ into South African human rights: transsexuality in the post-apartheid order
- Authors: Vincent, Louise , Camminga, Bianca
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141606 , vital:37989 , DOI: 10.1177/1363460709346108
- Description: Informed by narratives provided by self-identified South African transsexuals, whose lives span different periods of South Africa’s political and social history, this article seeks to explore how South Africa’s medical, legal and military establishments have exerted power over the transsexual body. A variety of studies outline the extent to which the apartheid state was a highly gendered state characterized by inflexible patriarchal norms and the dominance of violent and authoritarian forms of masculine expression. Hyper masculinization and militarization were explicit goals of the apartheid state. Deviance from the state’s prescribed gender norms was not simply socially unacceptable, it was, in many cases, punishable. South Africa’s post-1994 democratic Constitution, in contrast, explicitly outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But the democratic legal framework, which provides significant protections for freedom of sexual expression and freedom from discrimination for homosexuals has arguably had less of an impact on the lives of South Africa’s transsexual community. The state, even the post-apartheid state, has been loathe to move beyond the idea of a necessary correlation between the physical make-up of the body and the gender identity of a person in the way in which it has treated the idea of transsexualism.
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