This book investigates how customary practices in South Africa have led to negotiation and contestation over human rights, gender and generational power. Drawing on a range of original empirical studies, this book provides important new insights into the realities of regulating personal relationships in complex social fields in which customary practices are negotiated. This book not only adds to a fuller understanding of how customary practices are experienced in contemporary South Africa, but it also contributes to a large discussion about the experiences, impact and ongoing negotiations around changing structures of gender and generational power and rights in contemporary South Africa. It will be of interest to researchers across the fields of sociology, family/customary law, gender, social policy and African Studies.

This second edition of Helaine Selin’s successful Parenting Across Cultures comes at a time where interest in parenting has increased across the world as a result of the COVID pandemic, as parents and children were put into different and often challenging conditions. This new edition, like the first, contains chapters from countries in Asia, Africa, and South America as well as from indigenous cultures of several Western countries. The chapters were revised to include new research in the post-pandemic world. They show that there is a strong connection between culture and parenting: there are differences in affection and distance, harshness and repression, and acceptance and criticism. Some parents insist on obedience; others are concerned with individual development. This clearly differs from parent to parent, but there is just as clearly a connection to culture, which these chapters explore. In addition to the chapters on individual countries, the second edition includes a section on the pandemic, as well as new research on parenting and technology, gender, religion, adoption, step parenting, divorce, single parents, racism, gay parents, disabilities, autism, eating habits, transgender, attachment, migration, bullying, and refugee resettlement.

This book argues that South Africa is haunted by the spectre of reparation. The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to secure adequate reparation for the victims of colonisation and apartheid continues to drastically undermine the commission’s processes and legacy. Investigating the TRC’s key processes of amnesty, archiving and forgiveness in turn, the book demonstrates that each process is fundamentally thwarted by the terminal lack of reparation. These multiple forms of the spectre of reparation haunt post-apartheid society in deeply traumatogenic ways. The book proposes a new ethic of "reparative citizenship" as a means of encountering the spectres of reparation in a productive and transformative manner, generating hope even in the face of the irreparable. This book will be an important read for South Africans interested in overcoming the impasses and injustices that haunt the country, but it will also be of interest to post-conflict transitional justice and politics researchers more broadly.

This cross-disciplinary Research Agenda offers an in-depth exploration into financial resources within households, focussing specifically on how they are managed, how they are distributed and with what results. Bringing together an array of leading experts from the Global South and North, this Research Agenda examines the challenges facing researchers in this area, investigates developments in the field and analyses how research interacts with current public policy.

The people of Africa have contrasting perspectives on gender, feminism, and the family from their Western counterparts. Similarly, social structures like, religion, capitalism and the law require a context-specific application to polygyny. This book examines the construction of gender identity in adults raised in Zulu polygynous families in the Hammarsdale area in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It highlights the complexities of gender identities as participants negotiate between modern, constitutional, and individual freedoms and patriarchal, cultural, and communal customs and traditions. The themes also point towards the argument between individuality and collectivism in the creation of gender identity within polygynous families in Zulu culture. The South African Constitution guarantees gender equality and individual rights and freedoms for its citizens, yet customary law practices, like polygyny, appear to contravene these principles. The participants reveal that although women and men experience different consequences, they cite similar prevalent factors like gender role socialisation, naming practices and the doctrine of seniority, influencing their gender identity construction. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

Abstract: Somali refugees arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa following apartheid's official end in 1994 and have since established a well-organized "Little Mogadishu" in Mayfair, a suburb just west of the city center, which continues to grow as Somalis migrate to the country in search of peace, security, and livelihood opportunities. The backgrounds and experiences Somalis bring to Mayfair influence gender ideologies in the community and complicate gender relations as women and men construct and negotiate new identities in South Africa. Working with Somalis in Mayfair, I used mixed methods in this ethnographic study to collect data on the dynamics of gender. Employing a "gendered geographies of power" framework, I examine how Somalis make sense of their world and the contradictions that surround gender relations for women and men as they interact with one another and the larger South African community.

This book analyzes the intersections of gender, sexuality and migration in the South African context. It takes the form of a series of empirically-informed reflections on the ways that these issues have come together, and analyses the place that South Africa holds in increasingly global, and globally constrained, discourses around migration. This means that it is not just about gendered movement, or abuses faced by sexual minorities; it is about the ways in which gendered notions, which may or may not map onto different bodies, function in conversations on migration. The author challenges assumptions about what and who migrants are and the nature of their genders and sexualities, which have circumscribed the fierce debates about migration that are currently raging in the country. This does not mean, however, that it this is simply a book about South Africa. Rather, the author argues that global and local imperatives are constantly being negotiated as South Africa goes through a period of socio-political transition. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of migration studies, gender studies and race studies, as well as disciplines such as sociology, psychology and political studies.