Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters

Producing persons in Manenberg township South Africa

by Elaine R. Salo

The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape
Town’s inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered
persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of
ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity
is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven,
involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of
individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the
narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place
making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a
wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the
contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

£44.00

Format

Paperback

Clear

About the author

Elaine R. Salo

Elaine R. Salo, a feminist scholar and public intellectual, trained in
anthropology at the University of Cape Town, completing her PhD at Emory
University. She held positions at the University of the Western Cape,
in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, from 1988 to 1999,
moving to the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute from
2000 to 2008, before leaving to become director of Women and Gender
Studies at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2013. She became an
Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at
the University of Delaware, USA, in 2014.

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