The Daily Vox
Issues of gender and sexuality have been strongly debated in South Africa’s new democracy. From the National Women’s Coalition (NWC) in the early 1990s who influenced the progressive gender dimension of South Africa’s current Constitution to the protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s led by gay and lesbian activists. Still further, the Fees Must Fall movement in 2015 and 2016 put the issue of intersectionality square on the agenda for decolonising post-Apartheid society.
Yet, gender studies are still largely missing from university curricula and, in the realm of social policy, ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often and incorrectly conflated. The reporting of cases of femicide, intimate partner violence, and gender-based violence – which has sadly also affectedUJ students – have sparked public outrage and inspired numerous academic studies that attempt to understand how issues of patriarchy, heterosexism, and rape culture function and occur