Representation of South African Women in the Public Sphere
REPRESENTATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE PREPARED BY ADITI HUNMA, RESEARCH ASSISTANT 1 REPRESENTATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE METHODOLOGY The aim of this report is to explore how South African women are (re)presented by the media as they engage in the public sphere. It looks at women in three different fields namely, politics, business and art, analysing at the onset the way they argue, that is, as rhetorical agents. It ihen proceeds to assess how these women's gender is perceived to enhance or be detrimental to their capacity to deliver. In the process, the report comes to belie and confront various myths that still persist and taint women's image in the public arena. In the realm of politics, I will be analysing Cape Town Mayor and Head of DA, Helen Zille. In the corporate world, I will be looking at Bulelwa Qupe, who owns the Ezabantu, long-line Hake fishing company, and in the Arts, I will be looking at articles published on Nadine Gordimer, the author who bagged the Nobel Literature Prize less than two decades back. Data for this purpose was compiled from various websites, namely SABCNews.com, Mail and Guardian, News24, IOL and a few blog sites. It was then perused, sorted and labelled. Common topos were extracted and portions dealing with the (re)presentation of women were summarised prior to the actual write up. In the course of the research, I realised that the framing of events had a momentous bearing on the way the women came to be appear and so, I paid close attention to titles, captions and emboldened writings.
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