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'Becoming' and overcoming : girls’ changing bodies and toilets in Zwelihle, Hermanus
The dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 and 2013 in a South African township called Zwelihle in the Western Cape coastal town of Hermanus. Leading up to this period, protests motivated by a long growing dissatisfaction with shared temporary sanitation facilities and service...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Social Anthropology
2015
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| Summary: | The dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 and 2013 in a South African township called Zwelihle in the Western Cape coastal town of Hermanus. Leading up to this period, protests motivated by a long growing dissatisfaction with shared temporary sanitation facilities and services were rife within townships and informal settlements across the Western Cape, and the provision of toilets by municipalities that formed part of a national “Water is Life, Sanitation is Dignity” campaign became a highly politicised issue. Against this backdrop, and drawing on evidence gathered while doing ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Zwelihle, the dissertation highlights the relationship between reproductive health and sanitation. Specifically, it focuses on the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle who use predominantly public toilet facilities; and it uses Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of “becoming-woman” as a lens through which to consider how girls experience their changing bodies. The dissertation shows that, within South Africa’s climate of extreme sexual violence, the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle reflect the presence of fear in the everyday and their perceptions of public toilets and other ‘dark’ spaces as unsafe. Finally, it shows the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept “becoming-woman” as a theoretical lens through which to view how girls inhabit spaces in Zwelihle and adjacent areas, and how they inhabit their bodies; and it provides a means for an analysis that recognises the potential for girls and women to overcome imposed expectations that may appear to be simple realities. |
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