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How to cite this thesis

Surname, Initial(s). (2012). Title of the thesis or dissertation (Doctoral Thesis / Master’s Dissertation). Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/102000/0002 (Accessed: 22 August 2017). 1.

Contested Feminisms, Masculinism and Gender Relations in the Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command: A view from the branch

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Department of Anthropology & Development Studies

of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg

TERRI MAGGOTT 217040500

In Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Development Studies

October, 2019

Johannesburg, South Africa

Supervised by Dr. Trevor Ngwane Co-Supervised by Dr. Efua Prah 2.

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Miss Sthembile Mahlaba, a mother, teacher and agent of social change.

ABSTRACT

Scholars agree that the rise of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has altered South Africa’s political landscape since its inception in 2013. Its Student Command (EFFSC) has made similar pathways in student politics at institutions of higher learning, particularly in formal Student Representative Councils (SRCs) across the country, although little research exists on this level of EFF politics. The EFFSC played an important role in the trajectory and aftermath of the Fees Must Fall movement of 2015 and 2016, which critiqued the lingering colonial nature of education, knowledge production and patriarchy.

Scholars have further argued that the EFF subscribes to a masculine style of politics, evident in its choice of military attire and often clumsy grasp of how gender configures within its class and race analyses of the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism. However, no research exists on how instances of sexism play out within EFFSC branches or the emerging black radical feminist politics within its ranks. Focusing on a particular EFFSC branch, this study attempted to understand how gender justice configures within the student party’s struggles for ‘free education’ and ‘economic freedom’ and how the specific social processes which shape these expressions encourage or inhibit the scope for feminist politics in the EFF and EFFSC.

As a former leader and feminist in the branch under study, I coupled critical autoethnography with a thematic analysis of various data, including participant observations, interviews, a women-only focus group, documents and select social media posts. The analysis revealed three general positions within the branch regarding gender and feminism: Marxist feminism, which extended the EFF’s self-framed materialist feminist position by (over)emphasising class oppression under cpaitalism; anti-feminism, which draws on Marxist discourse to argue that feminism is a Western imposition and relies on sexualised violence to delegitimise women’s organising; and, in contrast, black radical feminism which simultaneously challenges the male hegemony I identified and transcends gender-neutral analyses of South Africa’s current economic situation.

These three expressions were located within larger gender relations characterised as sexist, masculinist and misogynist. The research was conducted during the branch’s 5. campaign and victory over the SRC at its campus in Johannesburg, South Africa. I argue that during this shift in student governance, the branch went from opposition to governance, and the male hegemony within it intensified as women fighters attempted to organise outside it. Despite this, women and feminist fighters resist erasure and exclusion from the EFFSC’s ideological work and from the political space using a black radical perspective that is both intersectional and interstitial, occurring at the margins of the masculinist politics that dominate the branch.

Keywords: Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command, masculinism, feminism, black radical feminism, anti-feminism, student politics, Fees Must Fall.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research would not have been possible without the women (and some men) of the EFF Student Command. Your commitment to feminist politics inspired me to complete this work, especially at times when I doubted its importance. I thank you all. The pride I feel towards your acts of strength and bravery will continue to inspire my political activism. I am so honoured to call you my comrades and for the love you show me so freely. Again, I thank you all.

I would also like to thank my supervisors, comrade Trevor Ngwane and Dr. Efua Prah, who pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of. Their input and encouragement were critical to this research, as they both pushed me to transcend the limits of my comfort zone, both intellectually and politically. To comrade Trevor, thank you for being there for me and helping me manage every obstacle, no matter how insignificant. Your contributions have enhanced my writing and thinking, and your constant positive outlook encourages me to continue being active in the tough terrains of political activism. To Efua, I am so grateful for the insightful ideas you’ve shared with Trevor and I, as well as for the feminist love you have shown me independent of this work. You’ve both challenged me in ways that will continue to shape my academic journey. I thank you both.

I would further like to acknowledge my fellow students for the countless study sessions and writing groups. I strongly believe that knowledge production is a collective project, and many of you were instrumental to this work in ways that cannot be quantified. It takes a village, right? Thank you the community we shared, especially to Francesco and Nicole. I’d also like to thank my loving partner for the encouragement, debates and advice you offered me during this process. Our discussions and debates (fights...?) about feminist issues were crucial to my intellectual and human development, and I thank you deeply for accompanying me on this intellectual rollercoaster. Much love to all of you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AFFIDAVIT iii ABSTRACT iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi TABLE OF CONTENTS vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS x LIST OF IMAGES xi 1. RESEARCHING MY COMRADES: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY 1 1.1. Introduction and Rationale 1 1.2. Research Questions and Sub-Questions 3 1.3. Aims and Objectives 4 1.4. Research Paradigm: Feminist epistemological considerations 4 1.5. Data Collection 5 1.6. Fighters as “Participants” 7 1.7. Data Analysis 8 1.8. Ethical Considerations 9 1.9. Reflexivity 11 1.10. Limitations of the Study 12 1.11. Outline of the Dissertation 14 2. BEYOND MASCULINISM: FEMINIST THEORY IN THE EFFSC 17 2.1. Introduction 17 2.2. “Where are the women?”: Masculinism in the EFFSC 18 2.3. Situating the EFFSC’s Class Analyses Within Feminist Theory 20 2.3.1. Marxist Feminism 21 2.3.2. Socialist Feminism 24 2.4. Forging Black Radical Feminism in the EFFSC 27 2.4.1. Radical Feminism 27 2.4.2. (US) Black Feminism 30 2.4.3. African Feminisms 31 2.4.4. Black Radical Feminism 33 2.5. Anti-feminism 35 2.6. Conclusions 36 8.

3. CONTESTED FEMINISMS: MARXISM, ANTI-FEMINISM AND RADICAL GENDER POLITICS 39 3.1. Introduction 39 3.2. Setting the Scene: The branch and the campus 40 3.2.1. Male Monopoly: The intersections of gender and age in branch leadership 40 3.2.2. From fighters/activists to student politicians/bureaucrats 43 3.3. “Capitalism is the ruling centre, capitalism decides what’s power”: Marxist feminism and structure-centric gender analyses 46 3.4. “The feminists of this branch are useless, power hungry idiots”: Anti-feminism in the branch 52 3.5. “This is a picture of a womxn base kas’ lam disrupting”: Black Radical Feminism in the EFFSC 62 3.6. Conclusion 69 4. ANTAGONISTIC GENDER RELATIONS, RAPE CULTURE IN THE EFFSC AND WOMEN’S RESISTANCE 71 4.1. Introduction 71 4.2. “If I tell people I am feminist, I am ridiculed for it”: Gender relations in the branch 72 4.2.1. Sexism and toxic masculinity 72 4.2.2 Normalised gender antagonisms and a ‘war on women’ 75 4.2.3. Roses, Rocks and Regality: Constructions of ‘female fighters’ 77 4.3. “You endanger us when you act like rape or abuse is something to look past”: Rape culture in the EFFSC 81 4.3.1. Sexism and misogyny as branch culture 81 4.3.2. Defending and rewarding violent masculinities 83 4.4. “I refuse to be referred to as ‘flower’ of the revolution”: Women’s agency and resistance 87 4.5. Conclusion 93 5. CONCLUSIONS: CONFRONTING MASCULINISM, EXPANDING FEMINISM AND ‘ECONOMIC FREEDOM’ 95 6. REFERENCES 100 7. APPENDICES 111 7.1. Appendix A - Semi-structured interview schedule 111 7.1.1. For EFFSC general (branch) members 111 7.1.2. For EFFSC Branch Leaders 112 7.2. Appendix B - Focus Group Schedule Guideline 114 9.

7.3. Appendix C - Interview Information and Consent Form 116 7.4. Appendix D - Focus Group Information and Consent Form 118

10.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ANC - African National Congress ANCYL - African National Congress Youth League BSCT - Branch Students Command Team CCT - Central Command Team (of the EFF) CSCT - Central Students Command Team (of the EFFSC) EFF - Economic Freedom Fighters EFFSC - Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command EFFWC - Economic Freedom Fighters Women’s Command FMF - Fees Must Fall LGBTQIA+ - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans gender, Queer, Intersex, A-sexual, All-sex NSA - National Students Assembly RAG - Rise and Give (student society) SASCO - South African Students Congress SRC - Student Representative Council PASMA - Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania

11.

LIST OF IMAGES

Image 1: Photograph of the newly elected SRC President of the University of Limpopo.

Image 2: Twitter response from EFF Treasurer General LeighAnn Mathys to EFF Secretary General Godrich Gardee’s tweet about EFF women as ‘roses of the revolution’.

Image 3: Photograph of ANC members dressed in gender fluid party clothing. 1.

1. RESEARCHING MY COMRADES: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY

1.1. Introduction and Rationale

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have significantly altered the South African political landscape, since its founding members split from the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) in 2012. Not without its growing pains and fair share of media controversy, the party is South Africa’s third largest political party, and has invigorated youth leftist politics (Nieftagodien, 2015), as well as the interest of South Africans in parliamentary politics (Mbete, 2014: 2). In 2015, its student wing, the EFF Student Command (EFFSC), which receives much, if not all, of its ideological orientation from its ‘mother body’, made similar pathways into student politics and movements, and in 2019, won the majority of Student Representative Councils (SRCs) across the country (Diko, 2018). Its socialist orientation and alignment with various protest and labour movements has resonated with South Africa’s black population, from both the working and middle classes (Ashman, Levenson and Ngwane, 2017: 77) as a viable alternative to the increasingly unpopular ANC. Yet, despite this revival of youth progressive politics, the EFF has been characterised as both populist (Mbete, 2016; Hurt and Kuisma, 2016) and masculinist1 (Magadla, 2013).

In 2015, the EFF’s newly established student wing, the EFFSC, joined a nation-wide student uprising organised under the broad name of #FeesMustFall (FMF). Although the movement attempted to retain a non-partisan stance (Naidoo, 2016: 184), many EFFSC leaders became influential FMF leaders, playing integral roles in the prevailing student politics, perhaps because the movement itself was an attack on the ANC government. Indeed, leaders such as Naledi Chirwa and Vuyani Pambo have graduated from leading FMF protests, to joining the EFF in parliament (Selisho, 2019). Within FMF, the students noticed how issues of gender and feminism sometimes clashed with the movement’s overall call for free, decolonised education and, in some instances, feminists and queer

1 Masculinism can be defined as a male-centric ideology that appears gender-neutral (Blais and Dupuis- Déri, 2012: 23) but essentially excludes, silences and oppresses women (Sharpley-Whiting, 1998: 11) by not accounting for the sexual and gender differences that shape the material, social and political experiences of women and men. 2. activists received violent backlashes from within the movement (Khan, 2017; Xaba, 2017).

After FMF, I joined the EFFSC and, during my activism, I noticed similar problematic gender views in the student command, such as dominant man leaders with women as deputies, and political education that never addressed gender oppression. In Image 1 below, of the newly elected SRC President of the University of Limpopo in 2017 and the current President of the EFFSC, women fighters parade alongside the single man leader, whose superiority to them is expressed by his elevated status of riding alone in the car. Women fighters here served as celebratory decorations in this procession, showing in some ways how the objectification of women is often unproblematised in the organisation’s branches.

Image 1: Photo of 2017 SRC President of the University of Limpopo and 2019-2021 EFFSC President, Mandla Sikwambana and women fighters celebrating SRC election victory in Polokwane, Limpopo.

I joined the EFFSC in 2017, the Year of the Branch, as EFF Commander-in-Chief Julius Malema named it (see Nicolson, 2017). I joined the student party and was elected Deputy, and later, Acting Secretary in an EFFSC branch. In 2018, I was elected the branch's preferred candidate for a position in a university’s SRC. This university is a former 3.

Afrikaans institution that underwent a merger with three other vocational institutions after 1994. Since then, the institution hosts a predominantly black student population, although the remnants of racial Apartheid are visible; for instance, in how cleaning and maintenance staff are predominantly low-wage workers, while administators are white former employees of the Afrikaans university.

During my term in office, I experienced and witnessed troubling instances of sexism, misogyny and rape apology, despite the party’s “anti-sexist” stance (EFFSC Constitution, 2015: 5). For example, a common sentiment held by both men and women was “I cannot be led by a woman”. Indeed, scholars have argued for the masculinist and male-bias nature of the EFF (see Magadla, 2013; and Dlakavu, 2018), although no scholarship exists on the particular forms of feminism and anti-feminism observable at the student branch level, which is what this thesis contributes.

Allegations of sexual abuse and exclusion within the EFF and its Student Command have captured the attention of the media (see Myeni, 2018; and Ebrahim, 2017b). For example, a journalist painted EFF “female fighters” as missing from the fight against patriarchy within and external from the party (Davis, 2019). However, the women of the EFFSC are not sitting back idly while their men fighters exercise toxic brands of masculinity. In 2017, for example, feminists from an EFFSC branch in Johannesburg went public with allegations of rape apology in the organisation (Ebrahim, 2017c). At a more senior leadership level, the women activists in the EFF have successfully campaigned for women’s employment rights (see Mathys, 2019). These important gains however, lose their legitimacy within the bounds of the pursuit for economic freedom, evident in the anti- feminism that I noticed at the branch. Yet, despite its masculinism, emerging from within the EFFSC is black radical feminism, which simultaneously resists the organisation’s anti- feminism and expands its current gender-neutral project for economic freedom.

1.2. Research Questions and Sub-Questions

The tension between preaching radical politics and behaving in a sexist manner towards women and feminist fighters interested me to ask serious questions about the nature of the EFFSC’s understanding of the struggle for economic emancipation, given that a large 4. majority of South Africans are black people, and more than half of those are women (Morrell, Jewkes and Lindegger, 2012: 13). The main research question asks: In which ways are feminism understood within the EFFSC and what is the political significance of this? Two supplementary questions were asked in order to draw broader judgments about why sexism, misogyny and allegations of abuse persist in a self-framed radical space: 1) How does the EFFSC’s ideology shape its understandings and expressions of (anti)feminism?; and 2) How, and why, is the broader societal culture of patriarchy reflected in the gender relations of fighters in the EFFSC? With these questions and my insider position, I hoped to achieve the following objectives.

1.3. Aims and Objectives

This research is informed by these two broad research objectives:

● To contribute to the current debates about gender within the EFFSC and the media, and; ● To raise ideological concerns and questions for the EFFSC in particular, and for student activism in South Africa more generally, so as to centre gender justice within the struggle for economic freedom.

1.4. Research Paradigm: Feminist epistemological considerations

This research is inherently qualitative because it asks about opinions, perceptions and behaviours (Okeck, 2013: 97). It also draws on the broad theoretical and epistemological tendencies inherent in black feminism, such as post-memory (Gqola, 2010) and visibilisation (April, 2012). “Aware that gender construction is part of the processes of knowledge construction” (Nnaemake, 2005: 7), this dissertation locates the emergent black radical feminism at the margins of the EFFSC, while recognising the need to centre feminism in student politics. Following from this, this qualitative research will centre the experiences of feminists in the branch, while tending to the ways in which gender relations underpin ideas of how feminism fits into the EFFSC’s larger project. Feminist epistemology was useful for this inquiry because it disrupts male dominance in the 5. production of knowledge, given that knowledge is inherently masculine (Bennett, n.d., in Lewis 2001: 8) and male dominated.

1.5. Data Collection

Various types of data were collected to triangulate the findings, because no method alone stood out as satisfactory in answering the research questions. Four main methods were employed independently and simultaneously in the data collection process, and these were; participant observation, semi-structured interviews, a focus group and specific EFFSC documents.

Participant observation was used as the main method of data collection. As Asanda Benya notes in her study, Invisible Hands, about women miners in Rustenburg, South Africa, “[I] employed this method because I was interested in the subtle nuanced, instantaneous, and unnoticeable ways in which gender is produced and practiced (Martin, 2001) and retrospective interviews would not have captured these” (Benya, 2016: 18).

The ‘participant’ aspect of the task involved participating in the social realities I was observing (Benya, 2016: 18), but I was not participating only as a researcher-cum- participant; instead, I was already a member and leader within the organisation. This sometimes complicated how the research fit into my political involvement in the space because the lines between research and political activism became blurred. As Adebanwi notes, “the ritual of membership … in different ways ultimately shapes the social relations between ethnographer and [those] who s/he is studying” (Adebanwi, 2016: 271). Without my membership, I would not have been able to gain access to the data required to answer the research questions; but equally, this research would not have occurred were it not for my EFFSC membership, which inspired me to ask these questions. This method was also linked to the critical autoethnography used to analyse feminists’ experiences within the political setting.

The ‘observation’ aspect involved keeping a research journal. When ‘working the ground’ – a term fighters use to describe the time used to engage with each other and other 6. students about political and more material issues, such as fees – I was able to observe the gender interactions and to gauge the general discourses and practices around feminism, sexism, and patriarchy. ‘Working the ground’ is an unspoken expectation for leaders, so I did this anyway, independent of the research. It was here where I told my ‘comrades’, as student activists refer to each other, about my research. They asked questions about it, such as how it would be conducted and what I would do with the final analysis. As usual, we also spoke about political theory and strategy, and the place of feminist politics in these. For ethical reasons, I abandoned the idea of including my personal notes from meetings in the analysis because this would be an invasion of those private meeting spaces. In essence, the journal was a record of my personal experiences of the key debates and issues about gender justice and sexism in the branch.

Another aspect of the observation included analysing 266 social media posts by fighters, former-fighters and EFFSC student leaders; the ethics of which are discussed below. These were either original written or photographic posts, or reposts by important activists and other fighters unknown to me, and were selected when they touched on issues framed within the bounds of the central thesis. These were useful because they showed how fighters express their socialist – or, at least, anti-capitalist – pro-black, and feminist politics; either openly, in debates and exhanges of ideas, or in blatant, sometimes hateful, opposition. Social media plays a significant role in mobilising students (Bashonga and Khuzwayo, 2017), thus it was a rich source of data because I was able to inter alia observe openly anti-feminist language and views.

Semi-structured interviews assisted in answering ‘how’ questions and for allowing for conversational flow which might not have emerged had I used a fixed interview schedule (Fylan 2005: 66). Because I was researching fellow fighters, a loosely structured instrument was necessary to maintain the ease of conversation that we, as comrades, usually engaged in. I formally interviewed six of my comrades (see note on sampling below), using the instrument attached as Appendix A of this document. The interviews revealed some intimate details that would probably not be spoken about openly in a group conversation, which usually happens very informally on the ground. 7.

The focus group was important for this research because, as Hennink (2014: 2) states, a range of ideas, perspectives and debates emerge from collective interaction. Twelve EFFSC women attended and participated robustly. In this important meeting, we were able to create a safe and free space in which to express our views as women — a rare occurrence in our branch. By creating a women-only space, this method also assisted in realising one of the research objectives, which was to stimulate debate within the branch about how us, as women, and feminist fighters define feminism in the EFFSC, and what our feminism politics looks like in action. Facilitated by a well-known, respected gender activist academic at the campus, the session was fruitful in that it highlighted the debates taking place, for example, around issues of how some women in the branch were active perpetrators of patriarchal sexism. I chose to have the session run by someone other than me because I was a senior-ranking member at the time (perhaps the most senior at the focus group) and felt that my presence would make the women feel obliged to participate. To manage this concern, I observed by taking notes and participated only when called on by the facilitator. The focus group concluded with a shared desire to meet more regularly as women fighters.

I also looked at various documents relating to the EFFSC, such as policies, media statements and news articles, so as to triangulate the research data. Bowen (2009: 29) shows that the use of document analysis is helpful in uncovering cultural codes and meaning making processes, thus being helpful to this inquiry. These documents included both the EFF and EFFSC’s respective constitutions and founding manifestos (EFF Constitution, 2014; EFFSC Constitution, 2015), two EFFSC elections manifestos, two EFFSC deployment guidelines documents, and four sections of the EFF’s 2019 election manifesto. In addition, I looked at eleven statements issued by the EFF, on relevant issues such as Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, 16 Days of Activism and the suicide of a Student Command leader, Khensani Maseko in 2018. Finally, I also collected five statements issued by the branch. 8.

1.6. Fighters as “Participants”

The sample used to select the respondents for the interviews was purposive in that I requested interviews from comrades who I knew had differing views on feminism and feminist politics. I selected four known feminist members and leaders, albeit with what I thought were slightly contrasting views and biographical profiles; one powerhouse woman leader in the branch, with strong yet developing feminist politics; and one former man leader and ideologue of the branch, whom I served alongside during my term as Secretary in 2017.

The site of research was the campus which housed the branch in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Following Adebanwi (2016: 275), I rejected framing the people in the study as ‘respondents’, ‘informants’ or ‘participants’ because they were my comrades with whom I held relationships which were informed by friendship as well as by power, for example, leadership. Our relationships were more complex than simple categorisations of ‘researcher’ and ‘informant’. Thus, the lines between researcher and researched were somewhat collapsed due to my positionality to the EFFSC.

1.7. Data Analysis

I conducted a thematic analysis of the extensive dataset, coupled with a critical auto ethnographic analysis. The thematic analysis was helpful in dealing with the large dataset because it helped me manage the data into smaller sections using a coding system. Although time consuming, this method encouraged a deep engagement with the coded data, which ultimately allowed me to identify four major themes. Following Terry, Hayfield, Clarke and Brawn’s (2017: 33) method of thematic analysis, I then sifted through each of the four main themes’ sub-themes, looking for patterns, cycles, and outliers. Engaging closely with the broader socio-political and gender context was also of critical importance because it helped to explain the nuances within and across themes.

The thematic analysis was coupled with a critical autoethnographic method of analysis. Critical autoethnography is an alternative form of the re-writing of selves in the social world (Denshire, 2014: 1) that is helpful for using the self to make visible larger 9. sociocultural processes (Griffin, 2012). This dissertation employed an analytical approach to auto-ethnography in that it “connects to some broader set of social phenomenon than those provided by the data themselves” (Anderson, 2006: 387). In line with the feminist epistemology I outlined above, this method was useful for subverting the traditional researcher-researched dichotomy of reductive scholarship, and it was a natural choice of method because of my positionality to the group that I was both a part of and researching. I experienced a discomfort in writing and reading autoethnographic research (Denshire, 2014: 15), a necessary discomfort because it helped me to scrutinise dominant frames of being and doing in the EFFSC specifically.

1.8. Ethical Considerations

Various ethical issues arose during the research process. For one, the distinction between my leadership role and research agenda was complicated. My leadership role began in the Branch Students Commands Team (BSCT) and later shifted to the SRC. This research began within that shift, and initially I had clear ideas about which method best satisfied the research questions, including the focus group, interviews and participant observations. However, my positionality to power in the branch privileged me in ways that ultimately benefited the research. For example, for the focus group, I invited women fighters by word of mouth and all were welcome. It served as a method of collection of collective ideas for this research but, for the larger branch, it was an instance of women coming together as EFFSC women. In this case, I was unsure if women attended because I was their leader and they felt compelled, or because they genuinely wanted to. In this way, the dual identities of ‘member/leader’ and ‘researcher’ were entangled in interesting ways. Ethically, this meant making deliberate decisions about what to report and what to exclude.

For the interviews and focus group, formal, informed consent was negotiated using a consent form, which both interview respondents and focus group participants signed after having read and asked questions.2 Interestingly, no one disagreed with any aspects of

2 See Appendix C for the interview information and consent form, and see Appendix D for the focus group information and consent form. 10.

the forms. Also interestingly, in the focus group, many women signed without asking of its significance, which confirmed my feeling that women fighters were excited to engage within the women-only space we had created. This could have been, however, due to my position as their leader — indeed, in the focus group, I was the most senior branch leader.

Collecting and analysing social media presents an ethical debate about the use of such data in social science research. Bashonga and Khuzwayo (2017: 38) argue that Twitter is “an appropriate platform for the analysis of opinions” because it “is a real-time information network” and because it is free and open. However, scholars such as Bishop and Gray (2018) highlight the issue of consent within the public context of social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. The social media posts I present for analysis in the third and fourth chapters are all completely anonymous, therefore their publishers face no risk of having their privacy invaded. In instances where rich posts came from more closed platforms, such as WhatsApp, I specifically obtained oral consent from the fighters to use them in this research. The purpose of including such data was to show the ways in which fighters express their understandings of how a focus on gender fits into the EFFSC, and was helpful in supplementing some of the observations I made about anti- feminists. Many of these men were leaders and larger public figures, hence I rejected the idea of formally obtaining consent, since their posts were published on open platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (see Bishop and Gray, 2018).

Another issue related to the ethics of anonymity. I have heard from fighters that some leaders are being intimidated by certain powerful comrades because of false rumours that they are possibly leading a feminist faction. It is within this context that I chose to use no names or pseudonyms in the write-up. It could be argued that this invisibilisation of fighters and feminists contradicts the larger feminist research goal of bringing marginalised experiences to the fore (hooks, 1984). But in a larger context of rumour mongering, cyberbullying and anti-feminism, I chose to anonymise everyone so as to protect personal and political identities. Feminist experiences within the branch are prioritised in the analysis, however.

This relates to the larger ethical issue inherent in the choice of autoethnographic methods, in that I had to consider how much to share: to share too little could make for an 11. insubstantial analysis, yet to share too much could result in harm for the feminists, the branch and the larger organisation. Sharing too much could render individual participant- fighters vulnerable (Adebanwi, 2016), especially in a social context of cyber bullying and rumour mongering towards dissenting fighters. To manage this ethical responsibility, I focused on a few key aspects of inquiry, such as how feminism was defined, accepted or rejected, and how men and women fighters relate to each other in specific instances. I balanced possibly damning evidence within a contextual analysis and/or in light of theory outlined in the literature review.

1.9. Reflexivity

My positionality as a so-called Coloured, English speaking woman, senior student and EFFSC leader was certainly a factor in generating the arguments that I make here. My leadership role in one of the branches was helpful because it allowed me unlimited access as a researcher in an otherwise potentially off-limits social setting. I was conscious of how my perceived power was an obstacle to collecting and analysing data. To counter this power imbalance, I did not approach ordinary members for interviews as I thought that they might feel compelled to agree. Instead, I requested interviews with former and fellow leaders and feminists. My positionality was thus not a hindrance to the research process, and possibly added to its development. My close social and political relations with some fighters allowed me to choose which fighters and documentary sources I wanted to engage with.

In his study, Elites, Ethnographic Encounters and the ‘Native’ Ethnographer, Wale Adebanwi highlights, “the field [was] also home in many instances” and, indeed, “I was also part of my own study” (Adebanwi, 2016: 271, original emphasis). Through the research, my own feminist politics were acutely developed and, as a result, I espoused a strong feminist political position with which to challenge the chauvinism and anti-feminism in partnership with my fellow feminists. In some ways, this feminist awakening – from scholarship and conversations with feminist comrades – led me to resign from the party when individual and collective resistance against sexism and misogyny proved impossible. For scholars researching gender in social settings to which they actively 12.

belong, an ethics of self-care is an important consideration, as the self becomes central to the research (Denshire, 2014: 11). The emotionally loaded findings led me to consider psychological debriefing from the research, as I was troubled by the disturbing findings, particular those around the theme of rape culture in the EFFSC.

Part of practicing reflexivity involved taking notes when observing the branch, and during the focus group and interviews, and reviewing methods when they seemed ill-suited. For example, I had initial doubts regarding the utility of semi-structured interviews, because during the first interview, I felt that the usually authentic conversation between myself and my comrade was suddenly uncomfortable and unnatural, stifling the chance to uncover relevant issues. I decided to complement the interview data with documentary sources (Bowen, 2009) and a focus group. But I did not stop requesting interviews from my comrades, and the transcription of the interviews was, to my surprise, rich with nuanced findings, perceptions and issues. Had I not been reflexive in firstly redesigning the project, and secondly in continuing the interview method, I would not have accessed the valuable data that I did.

1.10. Limitations of the Study

One limitation of the study is located in the sample of fighters that I engaged with. As mentioned above, I only spoke with one man. It could then be argued that the sample is skewed towards women and feminists, and that the data is thus unreliable. However, this was a deliberate decision that was taken in order to centre the experiences of EFFSC women and feminists, following a black radical feminist perspective (hooks, 1984). To counter this oversampling of women, I looked at the Facebook and Twitter posts of men fighters so as to gain an understanding of their gender politics. Therefore, while the data and analysis do overrepresent the views and experiences of women and feminists, an attempt was made to manage this by collecting social media data across genders.

Another limitation is that of generalisability. This is a narrative, autoethnographic account of one EFFSC branch, thus there are limitations to the kinds of conclusions I can draw for the larger organisation. Essop (2016) outlines that, while studying the branch level of the EFF might pose challenges in generalising for other branches, 13.

“[she] took the decision to limit the research to just one branch as this would allow for more depth in the analysis and not water down the dynamics that were already present in that branch” (Essop, 2016: 13). I found this argument applicable here, since no studies exist on the EFFSC, let alone its respective branches. To manage this limitation, I supplemented the data using documents such as EFFSC Founding Declaration (2015). Furthermore, branch issues were analysed within broader social realities so as to make sense of what was observed, and to look beyond the branch in some ways. Still, more research is needed about the nature or (anti) feminist politics emerging from within the branches.

Related to generalisability is the limitation associated with critical autoethnographies: how much to share. As Denshire (2014) notes, sharing too much can render participants and researchers vulnerable to social harm, especially in a context where researchers do not have the academic privilege of exiting the field, since the field is a real life setting (Adebanwi, 2016). To retain a level of integrity, I thus chose to exclude certain information that might do social and political harm to branch women and feminists, myself and the larger organisations. Excluding data has implications for the analysis (see Hughes, 2008) but this was managed using the thematic analysis, which brought the main themes within the data to light.

A third limitation revolves around the issue of reflexive research (see Keikelame, 2018). At times, it was challenging to separate the research from the work of political activism in the branch and governance in the SRC. As a student, I sometimes felt the separation between academic research and political work was very weak, resulting in feelings of frustration that sometimes drove me away from participating in the space. For example, I was often very frustrated with the outright sexism and homophobic language used by some comrades, which led me to stay away, especially towards the end of this project. Factions emerged, and my dissent as a feminist against the male monopoly positioned myself and others as ‘sellouts’ or ‘agents’. Independent of this research, rumours were used to spread rhetoric about my supposed factionalism, to the point where I was completely isolated from Central SRC coordination. I was forced to reflect on how my insider position as leader and outsider position as (feminist) researcher holds implications for the type of knowledge generated here (Keikelame, 2018). Using Keikelame’s (2018) 14.

advice, I countered my close positionality by again relying on contextualising the findings and analysis within larger social patterns and by using documentary sources beyond myself and the branch.

I chose to resign in March 2019 because of the mentally-exhausting sexism and, more broadly, because of the confines of being politically active within a bureaucratised student governance system (Nyundu, Naidoo and Chagonda, 2015). This had implications for the research because I was now a member and researcher only, and no longer a leader. My personal relationships with my comrades still stood, so I was not completely distanced from the branch through my resignation. I had already collected much of the data needed, and chose to work with that and additional documentary sources. When the need did arise, I contacted my comrades with follow-up questions. The main implication was that my method of participant observation had come to a complete end. I countered this limitation by supplementing the data with documentary findings in the form of policy documents and Twitter and Facebook social media posts, which was one way of ensuring that I was reflexive throughout the process.

1.11. Outline of the Dissertation

This chapter, Researching My Comrades: Introduction and Methodology, set out the context of aversion to women’s organising during FMF and, beyond that, gave rise to the research questions, as well as the methodological considerations that informed the inquiry. Here, I problematised the anti-feminism I observed in the EFFSC and introduced my central thesis, which holds that, despite anti-feminism and masculinism, black radical feminist politics emerge to counter patriarchal hegemony.

The following chapter, Beyond Masculinism: Feminist Theory in the EFFSC, outlines the existing literature on the EFF’s gender politics, particularly its masculinism and current working-class politics which inform its understandings of how gender struggles configure within the class-race nexus. I argue that, while the EFF’s current grasp of gender oppression under the racialised capitalist structure is gender neutral (Dlakavu, 2018) and masculinist (Magadla, 2013), there is hope and space within that analysis for black radical feminism, given the expressions of this, observable from the branch that I studied, as well 15.

as within its ideological footing, which is unpacked in this chapter. The literature largely lacks a deep understanding of feminism within the EFFSC, thus this research study is seminal in filling this gap.

The third chapter, Contested Feminisms, presents the main theoretical findings of how feminism is expressed within the EFFSC, identifying three main trends, namely, Marxist feminism, anti-feminism and black radical feminism. In the EFFSC, Marxist feminist arguments are used to foreground the capitalist economic structure as the main source of women’s oppression, and the EFFSC’s formal policy, for example in its Constitution (2015), fits squarely into this. In addition, is an observable anti-feminism, which links directly to the party’s masculinism, largely unexplored in empirical scholarship, particularly in Africa. Adjacent, and in opposition to this, black radical feminism is also observable at the branch level. It challenges the EFFSC’s gender neutral analysis of oppression under imperial capitalism by highlighting how violent masculinities are left unchecked in the party, and how intersections of oppression are important considerations when struggling towards economic freedom. This feminism is at once intersectional and interstitial, occurring at the margins of the EFFSC’s political community.

The fourth chapter, Antagonistic Gender Relations, Rape Culture and Women’s Resistance, presents an analysis of antagonistic gender relations between fighters, the influence of EFFSC ideology on gender politics, rape culture and how women resist patriarchal masculinism in the branch. Here, I argue that the feminisms outlined in the third chapter are underpinned and influenced by particular patriarchal practices, such as sexism and misogyny, and a specific interpretation of the EFF’s self-identified Marxist Leninist Fanonian ideology (EFFSC Constitution, 2015: 4). The chapter also highlights a gendered political pattern that I identified, which is how violent masculinities are not challenged, but rewarded in various ways, mainly with promotion through the ranks. Women are sometimes radicalised into feminism, but many simply resign from the organisation. Here, exit is framed as a form of resistance against the larger rape culture. These findings are contextualised in light of broader social phenomena, such as femicide and neoliberalism. 16.

The final chapter, Confronting Masculinism and Expanding Feminism and ‘Economic Freedom’, concludes this dissertation, suggesting ideas for the EFFSC to consider in dismantling the violent masculinities that have flourished internally. It reflects on the critical arguments made in each chapter and highlights the theoretical complexities that the findings evoke in light of black radical feminism, and more broadly for student politics. I also suggest future areas for research.

At the outset, I alert the reader to the use of the term ‘womxn’. In recent black-led social movements, such as FMF and Black Lives Matter, central to which were women, trans and gender non-conforming people (Khan, 2017), the use of the word ‘womxn’ emerged on social media platforms and has found its way into academic research on gender subjectivities (see Ashlee, Zamora and Karikari, 2018). Still largely under-theorised in social movement and gender research, it indicates an aversion to white, economically privileged womanhood, complicating race, sexuality and ableism inherent in past feminist movements; although a new debate is emerging on social media about how ‘womxn’ excludes trans women by collapsing women and men back into fixed biological categories (see Regan, 2018). In different contexts, womxn can refer to one woman or many women. I ask the reader to be flexible when encountering this spelling, especially in the empirical chapters, where primary findings are engaged.

17.

2. BEYOND MASCULINISM: FEMINIST THEORY IN THE EFFSC

2.1. Introduction

Since its founding on the symbolic 26th of July, scholars have asked about the place of radical gender politics within the EFF (Nieftagodien, 2015: 455). In this chapter, I survey literature related to what I have identified as two broad trajectories of feminist expressions evident in the formal policy, ideology and collective political identity of the EFFSC, namely, class-based feminisms and black feminisms. Employing these and related feminist approaches is useful to this study as they highlight the fundamental concepts, divergences and developments of how feminism can, and has been, defined theoretically and practically, which assists in better understanding the nature of the EFFSC’s gender politics, situating these within a wider feminist theoretical frame.

A new feminism was developed in Fees Must Fall, what Miller (2016) has called a rupture from older versions of feminism in South Africa. As Whittier (1997) argues, the ways in which feminism is defined differ across space and time, and from generation to generation, are relevant in explaining the new wave of black radical feminism at play in the ideological makeup of FMF (Xaba, 2017) and in its aftermath. This indicates a break from older feminist articulations in South Africa (Miller, 2016: 270), which centred on women’s liberation within nationalist struggle (Hassim, 2017). EFFSC women offered critical feminist politics to FMF (see Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell, 2018) but to the best of my knowledge, no scholarly attention has been paid to feminist politics in the EFF, other than Dlakavu (2018), who studied the ‘mother body’ leaders, but not the EFFSC, or at the branch level. A change in the nature of feminism in South Africa in the post-FMF period and the overlaps of this with the EFFSC are of particular interest here.

This chapter takes the following structure. Firstly, the relevant literature of masculinism (Magadla, 2014), or more specifically, patriarchal masculinism, in the EFF is evaluated because it assists in framing the current trajectory of gender politics in the EFFSC. Masculinism refers to “a discourse of heroic masculinity” in which women are not seen as full political beings, their views are always expressed by, and in agreement with, men (Unterhalter, 2000 cited in Magadla, 2014: 2). Although this outlook can appear as 18.

gender-neutral (Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2012: 23) it essentially excludes, silences and oppresses women (Sharpley-Whiting, 1998: 11) by not accounting for the sexual and gender differences that shape the material, social and political experiences of women and men.

Secondly, I review the literature on Marxist and socialist feminism, in an attempt to pick out hidden expressions of gender justice in its masculinist posture. Thus, feminist theory is put into conversation with the organisation’s Marxist Leninist Fanonian ideological orientation (EFF Constitution, 2014: 2). In the preamble of the EFFSC Founding Declaration (2015: 1), as well as various EFF documents (see EFF Constitution, 2014: 1), it states that the organisation “draws inspiration from Marxist-Leninist and Fanonian schools of thought on its analysis of colonialism, the education system, imperialism, race and class contradictions in every society”. Although any kind of gender analysis is missing from this formal framing, I argue that there is indeed scope, albeit limited, for feminism in the EFFSC’s “gender-neutral” ideology (Dlakavu, 2018: 40) using Marxist- and socialist feminism.

Thirdly, the theoretical limitations of black radical feminism are explored in light of the particular feminism argued for within the branch under study and in FMF, in which the EFFSC was an integral player. This includes elements of radical-, United States (US) black-, and African -feminisms. In this way, I arrive at a simultaneous theoretical framing of feminisms within the EFFSC and a critique of the organisation’s current gender politics, which informs its current gender blind project for black economic emancipation.

2.2. “Where are the women?”: Masculinism in the EFFSC

When the EFF was launched in 2013, men dominated the press conference, while the few women fighters in attendance did little speaking (Dlakavu, 2018: 48). The existing literature on gender politics in the EFF is growing, but two important sources stand out on challenging male dominance within the party. Firstly, Magadla’s (2013; 2014) argument of masculinism in the EFF is useful for critiquing its gender politics. In this nationalist narrative, men are heroes and women are invisible or agentive, relative only to men. For example, in the ANC’s national imagination and memory, of which the EFF draws on 19.

extensively (Nieftagodien, 2015), women are framed as mothers and wives. In this discourse, women within political movements constantly resist erasure from history, as well as from central coordination and ideological work.

The phrase ‘patriarchal masculinism’ is perhaps more accurate in this case because it highlights how patriarchy configures to support masculinism in political spaces (Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2012). This is connected to the larger culture of patriarchy in South Africa and the ways in which this system of domination filters in the EFF, despite its framing as a revolutionary party. Essop (2016: 42) is useful for locating the EFFSC’s masculine style of politics within the history of the ANCYL, from which the EFF emerged (Forde, 2014). The war-like aesthetics of the EFFSC’s signature red beret and overalls represent an aggressive masculinity which relies on, for example, violence during protest action and the exclusion of women from leadership (Magadla, 2014).

Secondly, Dlakavu’s (2018) thesis that the EFF’s ideology is inherently biased towards masculinism is of critical importance here. This literature is useful in explaining how the EFF’s masculinism is rooted in a male-dominated, nationalist ideology of freedom from oppression, but it is limited in that it stops short of accounting for the ways in which gender politics is specifically constructed in the EFFSC, and the processes that underpin these. In her study of the political importance of women’s contributions to the EFF, Dlakavu (2018: 27) argues that the EFF’s masculinism is located within a broader nationalism in which violent forms of masculinity persist after the nation is liberated from colonial rule. Using “narratives and biographical interpretive methods” (Dlakavu, 2018: 14) to explore EFF gender practices and policies, she argues that the EFF’s ideology is inherently masculinist and gender-neutral. Masculinism sets limitations to its grasp of, and attention to, gender justice. What is needed then is an uncovering of the feminism coming from women EFFSC leaders, largely absent from the literature. Within the EFFSC’s Marxist Leninist Fanonian framing, there is space for feminist politics, since these separate ideologies are not inherently opposed to women’s liberation. 20.

2.3. Situating the EFFSC’s Class Analyses Within Feminist Theory

In its Founding Manifesto, the EFF positions itself as an organisation grounded in Marxist Leninist Fanonian theory (Shivambu, 2014: 66). Dlakavu (2018) argues that this ideological grounding is masculinist because it centres race and class struggles without accounting for the gender dimension of those oppressions. I find this useful because it accounts for the EFFSC’s internal, ideological struggle to overcome sexism, masculinism, and patriarchal behaviours within the organisation. However, I want to exercise some hope for a broader focus on gender justice within the EFFSC by arguing that there is scope, although limited, for feminism within the EFF’s working class politics, in light of Marxist- and socialist-feminist arguments about the gendered nature of capitalist society. Picking out the feminism within the EFFSC’s ideological triad is a start towards disrupting its inherent masculinist ideology; thus this section reviews the literature on class analyses of gender oppression, namely Marxist- and socialist feminism.

It is surprising that any mention of gender in the EFF’s Founding Manifesto (EFF Constitution, 2014) only appears in Point 105 (Shivambu, 2014: 154). From this, a specific form of liberation is envisioned, one that to date has difficulty placing gender oppression and justice at the centre of its discourse (Dlakavu, 2018). Although the place of women and gender justice in Marxist analyses has been a difficult articulation (Hartmann, 1979), scholars have made visible the links between the two. For example, Smetona (2018) shows how the interrelation of production and reproduction under capitalism produces gendered oppressions which are supported, and indeed perpetuated, by the nuclear family. In addition to its class analysis and Marxist Leninist outlook, the EFF relies on Fanon’s theories of African nationalism and decolonisation to contextualise its racialised struggle for economic freedom within the economic conditions specific to Africa (Ndlozi, 2016). Dr. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the party’s national spokesperson, argues that the EFF “draws its understanding of colonial and anti-black racism from Fanon” (Ndlozi, 2016), suggesting that Fanonism represents the racial element of capitalism often missing from Marxist analyses. While this is a step towards intersectional thinking, missing from the conversation is how the category of gender fits into oppression under patriarchal capitalism. 21.

Feminists have argued that Fanon’s constrcution of Algerian women as submissive, revolutionary, and as wives is chauvanist because it polices women’s bodies and politics, framing them within the confines of the nation, which is itself a source of gender oppression (Xaba, 2017); yet, Sharpley-Whiting (1998: 10) argues against Fanon’s chauvinism by disentangling Fanon’s ideas from his narrow framing of women and thus, carves a space for feminist thinking within his theories of nationalism and decolonisation. Fogel (2013) argues that, contrary to the South African liberal media’s characterisation of Malema as a facist (Shivambu, 2014: xv), the EFF is a nationalist organisation, evident in its calls for the nationalisation of state resources for socialism (see EFF Founding Manifesto, 2013). If we accept that nationalism takes precedence over women’s struggles (Hassim, 2006), then the EFF must tend to thinking about how to avoid falling into the masculinist trap of national liberation (Magadla, 2014).

2.3.1. Marxist Feminism

For Marxist feminists, the source of gendered oppression is the economic structure of capitalism, under which women are seen as private property, owned and policed by the all-commanding man head of the household (Davis, 1981). In this perspective, women’s oppression stems from the interrelation of production – working, selling labour for wages – and reproduction – birthing, sustaining the workforce – under capitalism (Smetona, 2018). Central to this system is the organising unit of the nuclear family. Indeed, Engel’s seminal work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884 in Boucher, 2014), highlights the centrality of the nuclear family in both classes of society: in bourgeois families, women as wives perform reproductive labour, producing heirs; while in working class families, because the family has little or no private property to transmit, women are oppressed as both reproductive and wage labourers (Hartmann, 1979: 3). This thinking laid the foundation for the merging of Marxist and feminist thinking.

The earliest formulations of Marxist feminism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the writings of women activists such as Alexandra Kollontai (1909) and Rosa Luxemburg (Nye, 1994). In her essay, The Woman Question, Kollontai (1909) critiqued liberal notions of feminism, for example, those held by the US-based 22.

National American Women’s Suffrage Association (1848 - 1920), arguing instead that the debate about the superiority of one sex over another was evidence of bourgeois ideology. Her remedy was “the radical solution of the workers’ question [which] is possible only with the complete reconstruction of modern reproductive relations” (Kollontai, 1909: 2). These feminists argued that class struggle was central to dismantle women’s oppression, but the decline of the early Euro-American women’s movement, coupled with relative gains made by suffragists, laid these arguments to temporary rest (Boles, 2006).

Later, Marxist feminists in the 1970s (see Hartmann, 1979; and Smetona, 2018) further developed their understanding of the symbiotic relationship between production – the male-dominated, public sphere of life, and reproduction – the private, female domain of housewifery – arguing that any feminist analysis of capitalist oppression must engage with structural phenomena of oppression in order to challenge it (Davis, 1981). Conditions of capitalism in the 1970s in the West – with the global oil crisis and growing ideological tensions between pro-capitalist and socialist states – shifted activist and scholarly attention from structure-centric approaches, towards more nuanced accounts of the agency of men and women in relation to, and with each other, in resistance to capitalist framings of gender roles, in the workplace, home and activist spaces.

For example, scholars such as Heidi Hartmann (1979) argued that housework is a form of labour that is unpaid, but is essential to the production and reproduction of the economy, thus encouraging a thinking around wages for housework, and questioning male dominance in the private sphere of life. Similarly, in her essay Revolution at Point Zero, Federici (2012) argues that housework must be shared, therefore challenging Marxists to see women, not only as working class subjects in relation to the capitalist structure, but as women, as gendered subjects, in relation to patriarchal macrostructures. This resurgence in Marxist feminist thinking can be associated with the rise in the women’s movement, sometimes called Second Wave feminism, and has close ties to socialist feminism.

In South Africa, this trend of feminism, also called the workerist or materialist position (Hassim 2017), was developed within, and alongside, the context of the nationalist struggle against Apartheid (April, 2012: 82). The efforts of women in trade unions, civic 23. movements and political formations were critical to both anti-apartheid activism and the nature of the new democracy. Women of this feminism usually belonged to political organisations with Marxist tendencies, such as the South African Communist Party and various trade unions, envisioning their liberation as part of the larger project against racialism, sexism, and capitalism in South Africa, and thus pushed for a Marxist analysis of ‘the woman question’ in the 1970s (April, 2012). However, as April (2012: 80), in her study Theorising Women, aptly highlights, the “[feminist] articulation was always difficult”, because feminist theory takes, as its point of departure, the different aspects of gender oppression and, in the South African context, the struggle for nationalism always subsumed feminist articulations and women’s liberation.

This led to what Hassim (2017: 221) calls a two-stage theory to women’s liberation: national and socialist liberation first, women’s liberation will follow. The EFF echoes this argument, arguing that “the EFF believes that gender-based violence and related antisocial activities are reinforced and even sustained by the deplorable general conditions of our people; therefore, a key to female emancipation is the emancipation of all” (EFF Election Manifesto, 2019: 2). This mechanical view of change plays a role in limiting a dialectical understanding of how gender oppression is meshed with other oppressions under neoliberal capitalism. The EFF’s feminism arguably fits its gender politics within this broad feminist tradition, or a “materialist feminist position” (Shivambu, 2014: 98). Within the EFF and EFFSC, major emphasis is placed on the relations of women to the capitalist system, but hardly any on the relations of men to women and vice versa.

The Marxist feminist perspective is somewhat limited because it produces what Hartmann (1979) calls a sex-blind theory of gender relations and oppressions under capitalism. The ways in which the matrix of hetero-capitalist patriarchy oppresses women as women is unaccounted for, dismissing issues such as the reproductive and emotional labour that women perform with no economic benefit. The EFF falls into this mistake, as Dlakavu (2018) shows, by centering racist oppression under capitalism in its ideological posturing, resulting in an over-emphasis on class oppression and an under-theorising about how men and women relate to each other as gendered beings and economic actors, as well 24. as how black women are particularly oppressed. A sex-blind emanicipatory project such as that of the EFF and EFFSC – “Economic freedom in our lifetime” and “Free education in our lifetime” – fails to imagine what relations between gendered bodies will be post- capitalism. This is not specific to the EFF or EFFSC but rather, is embedded in South Africa’s political history which sees women’s oppression as incidental to the nationalist question (Hassim, 2017). A deeper thinking around the role of gender relations is needed in this perspective.

Another critique of Marxist feminism is that it does not account for the current relationship between the prevailing patriarchal capitalist structures, which in turn dismisses a thinking around how the conditions of capitalism have changed since earlier Marxist arguments (Bandarage, 1984). For example, Bandarage (1984: 506) highlights that the number of women-headed households has increased since early industrial capitalism. Similarly, Benya (2015) is also useful here, arguing that issues of social reproduction must enter the debates informing class struggle in South Africa. Shivambu (2014) is vague on how economic conditions for black women have changed since 1994, but this is perhaps evidence of the limitations of adopting a two-stage theory of liberation. It assumes that one area of social change will automatically give rise to another. The feminist perspective of the EFFSC is therefore rooted in an outdated understanding of women’s economic realities, as well as a mechanistic approach to Marxist politics that fails to see the multidimensionality of oppression under capitalism. This suggests that, while anti-sexist in rhetoric, the EFFSC has trouble understanding gender justice outside of its dated Marxist frame.

2.3.2. Socialist Feminism

Feminism can also be defined from a socialist perspective, which uses Marxist analyses to centre working class women in feminist and socialist discourses. Activated in the context of the black power movement in the 1970s and ‘80s in the US (Hooks, 1984), socialist feminists argued for a critique of the entangled systems or structures of oppression, namely capitalist exploitation, anti-black racism and white supremacist 25. patriarchy. It could be argued that the intersectional praxis of feminist thinking was first developed here. Socialist feminism can be defined as: “the fight to end male supremacy as key for social justice, but it was not the primary contradiction, rather it was one among many. Most commentators on early socialist feminism identify struggles against racism as well as class exploitation as key for women’s liberation” (Kennedy, 2008: 500, emphasis added).

This definition shows a broader focus including, but not limited to, patriarchy and male domination, stressing the effects of racial and class oppression for women and for black women specifically (Lorde, 1997). This intersectional praxis (Kennedy, 2008) is important for imagining political action outside the limits of masculinism and for creating political spaces in which working, black, lesbian and trans women can find meaningful expression to pursue their collective aims (Lorde, 1997). Scholars such as hooks (1984) argue that the interwoven nature of oppression in contemporary society can best be described as the superstructure of white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Socialist feminists were thus able to link the concepts and lived experiences of racial and capitalist exploitation, to sexist oppression. hooks (1984) highlights tensions within the US feminist movement, which was often dominated by white women, because racism within the movement was not addressed meaningfully (Lorde, 1997). The movement’s tendency towards ‘non-racism’ led to a situation in which recruiting black women was an end in itself, rather than a means to expand the discourse of gender liberation to tackle systemic racism (hooks, 1984: 16). Anti-black racism and working class issues must be addressed in feminism in order for them to be tackled (hooks, 2005). The EFFSC can learn from this argument in order to expand its currently limited understanding of gender justice in relation to economic emancipation.

The organisation’s current grasp on gender oppression has been flimsy in comparison to its clear arguments about the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism. When the party speaks about women’s oppression, it does so without understanding the intersections of gender with race and/or class (Abdullah, 2017), and its race politics do not extend to black women, despite the strong presence of black radical feminists in both organisations (Ebrahim, 2017b). In The Coming Revolution, the EFF’s Deputy President Floyd 26.

Shivambu (2014) highlights the limitations of a rights-based approach to women’s freedom, labelling it a liberal approach. He remedies women’s oppression under neoliberal capitalism with the need for a larger critique of the structurality of gender and economic oppression, but ends up arguing for “setting out from the beginning a clear programme informed by the need to have a focus on women’s right” (Shivambu, 2014: 99), at the very position he started off arguing against.

In contrast, in his paper Sociological Pathology of Gender and Sexuality, Masita (2018) argues for the need of an intersectional socialist feminist approach to economic freedom within the EFF, one that centres both structural and cultural challenges to capitalism, neoliberalism and imperialism. Masita’s argument is of critical importance here because it highlights the scope for feminism within the struggle for economic freedom. Masita (2018: 9) arrives at the conclusion for a Women’s Command structure within the EFF: “We essentially can’t claim to be a party that espouses genuine participatory democracy, in the mould of democratic socialism or Marxist democracy, if when we don’t have a Women’s Command, particularly when women make up the majority of our population”. This is surprising because this has the dangerous potential to forfeit women’s needs at the expense of the party’s needs, as the ANC Women’s League has shown several times (Gouws, 2014).

Currently, the EFF’s gender language lacks the intersectional tone that has become the hallmark of progressive and radical feminist projects (Kennedy, 2008). Since The Coming Revolution (Shivambu, 2014), the party’s gender awareness has increased, evident in its use of pro-feminist language in recent statements. For example, the statement On Father’s Day (2018) critiques violent masculinity, linking it to landlessness and corruption. But, there is no evidence to suggest that this is happening at the policy level of the student wing. I find Masita (2018: 5) useful here for arguing that the “EFF should explore a multi- pronged theoretical approach… [in] establishing a gender and sexuality conscious comradery” that socialist feminism offers in its move away from the orthodox Marxism of the Soviet Union, towards a more “modern socialist feminism” which works towards ending “mutually reinforcing economic and cultural foundations of women’s subjugation”. 27.

2.4. Forging Black Radical Feminism in the EFFSC

Recently in the EFFSC, elements of black radical feminism are amending the party’s haphazard feminism, but this is largely under-researched in the literature. For example, Naledi Chirwa, a leading EFFSC feminist, led the #ThisIsMyVagina Campaign in 2017 to bring awareness to how women’s bodies are policed by men under patriarchal capitalism (Ebrahim, 2017a). Dlakavu (2018) is seminal in this respect because she successfully uncovers the feminist positions of leading women in the EFFSC. Her biographical profile of Mandisa Mashego, EFF Chairperson of Gauteng, reveals hints of black radical feminist politics that constantly resist erasure and invisibilisation by “mainstream[ing] gender in her analysis of challenges facing local government” (Dlakavu, 2018: 102), for example.

Similarly, the recent article by Leighann Mathys, the EFF’s Treasurer General, brings to light the gender focus that women leaders struggle around (Mathys, 2019), for example, healthcare access for women and employment rights for sex workers. When Dlakavu’s scholarship is taken together with the Mathys’s self-framing of the EFF as a feminist organisation, one can argue for the need to systematically investigate this black radical feminism. This research is a start in this vein. In reviewing the literature, I found that ‘black’ and ‘radical’ are either conceptually distinct, or that black feminism is assumed to be radical in nature and is thus often detached from ‘radical’. The following section unpacks these complexities theoretically, in light of the EFFSC.

2.4.1. Radical Feminism

Radical feminism is often referred to in connection with the ‘second wave of feminism’ in the US women’s movement of the 1970s (Boles, 2006). Specific to the North American context, it was a movement dominated largely by white cis-hetero and lesbian middle- class women who were attempting to expand the liberal feminist call for legislative change to include a fight against sexism, patriarchy and heteronormative gender roles and sexualities (Firestone, 1972). These foci give this feminism its radical nature: it is a critique of the systemic sexist antagonisms between the genders and structurality of heteronormative patriarchy. 28.

For radical feminists, the superstructure which underpins sexist oppression and behaviours is that of patriarchy. Sexism can be defined as either blatant or covert “discrimination based on gender, or as a set of attitudes, conditions or behaviours that promote stereotyping of social roles based on gender” (Swim, Mallett, and Stangor, 2004: 6). Anderson (2015) highlights that sexism can be hostile or violent, as well as benevolent and steeped in condescending language. Both are underpinned by a biological determinism of men’s superiority relative to women’s inferiority. Indeed, feminists such as hooks (1984) argue that sexism is the system of behaviours that both enforces patriarchy and is a function of it.

Patriarchy can be defined as a gendered system of oppression in which men dominate and oppress women by exercising their socially-sanctioned privilege and power over them (Millett, 2005: 38). This definition is useful because it speaks to the related issues of gender privilege, heteronormativity in the form of male-female binary, and sexist oppression and domination. However, this definition lacks a critique of how anti-black racism and capitalist oppression are woven into the fibre of patriarchy and vice versa; echoing black feminists such as Lorde (1997), and African feminists such as April (2012). Indeed, radical feminism is an extension of a more liberal feminism.

Liberal feminism emphasises a focus on the equality of the sexes; conceptualising a freedom from sexism as possible through a liberalisation of the public and private spheres of life, in which equality of opportunity is not differentiated between men and women (Bhandary, 2016: 156). An early goal of the feminist movement was to struggle for universal suffrage. These feminists, largely white middle class women, imagined a society characterised by equal opportunity, regardless of sex, in which wives could choose to work and not be confined to the marital realm of housework and childbearing and raising (Epstein, 2014), including the right to vote – political equality – and to choose the workings of one’s life and body – social equality. Only in the 1960s, alongside the women’s movement, the New Left and the black power movement in the US, did liberal feminism shift from a rights-based focus on free choice and universal suffrage to thinking about sexism more deeply (Boles, 2006). 29.

In South Africa, liberal feminism has a “peculiar trajectory in gender politics” (Hassim, 2017: 220). For example, in her chapter entitled Postponing The National Question: Feminism and the Women’s Movement, Hassim (2017) shows that the historical development of feminist politics for women’s right to vote was first carried out by Afrikaner nationalist women. Black women were deliberately excluded from the debate by virtue of their blackness in an anti-black regime, further perpetuating their experience of oppression rather than emancipating them from it (Jagarnath, 2019). I agree with Jagarnath’s (2019) argument that feminism has been reduced to this liberal tendency and, because it lacks a structural critique, it found very little expression in the mass anti- apartheid struggle (Hassim, 2017: 219).

This reduction of feminism in South Africa to liberalism is possibly part of the reason for a significant push for women’s developmental projects under former President Thabo Mbeki’s rule, whereby gender parity was pursued as a solution to gender oppression (Morrell et al, 2012: 17). For example, such as the various United Nations Women initiatives, developmental projects of this view give more women access to sustainable work, education and access to leadership in government and civil society (Ahikire, 2014). However, this ‘Women In Development’ strain of liberal feminism framed black and African women as passive absorbers of neoliberal development initiatives, thereby perpetuating, not dismantling their oppressions (Ahikire, 2014: 11), which is arguably how the 50-50 policy of the EFF has been mechanised.

Gender parity or gender equality has been institutionalised within the EFF and EFFSC in the form of the ‘zebra-’ or ‘50-50’ policy, leading scholars to argue that the organisation is gender progressive (Gender Links, 2016 in Dlakavu, 2018). The EFF, a self-proclaimed anti-sexist and anti-patriarchal organisation, sees sexism and patriarchy as endemic of the capitalist economic structure (Shivambu, 2014: 99) which can be combated by implementing measures such as the 50-50 rule. This means that the EFFSC populate their decision-making structures, from bottom to top, with an equal number of men and women, a progressive move towards gender justice in South African political parties, particularly at the national levels (Gouws, 2014). As Bandarage (1984) points out, liberal arguments for women’s development in post-independent African states, for example, 30.

significantly challenged the masculinist domination of men in newly developing countries. Reviewing the literature uncovered the debates around gender parity, that while gender parity can be used to level the gender imbalances inherent in political parties (Gouws, 2014), it can also be a mechanism of reproducing sexism, rather than tackling it (Magadla, 2014).

Similar to liberal feminism, in South Africa, radical feminism has again been associated with Western, white women (April, 2012: 81). Indeed, the literature is full of critiques of how radical feminism essentialises gender as the only analytical tool with which to study women’s oppression (Oyewumi, 1998). Hassim (2017: 221) is useful in pointing to the marginal ideological footing held by radical feminism during the anti-Apartheid struggle. Class and race privilege is associated with this brand of feminism in South Africa, says Hassim (2017: 221), because of its association with white, university educated women. It was often seen as premised on a hate for men, which many women saw as culturally misplaced (Nkealah, 2016: 62). For example, many ANC men saw feminist activities as threatening to, or detracting from, the nationalist struggle against racial domination (April, 2012). This feminism was thus associated with Western (imperial) thought and ideology. In contrast to white and Western radical feminism, black and African feminists started articulating their own critiques of gender oppression.

2.4.2. (US) Black Feminism

Black feminism emerged in the US in the context of the New Left Movement of the 1970s, concurrently to radical feminist organising (Roth, 2003: 47). It foregrounded the intersections of oppression that shape the social, political and economic lives of black women. During the 1960s, the non-violent civil rights movement was abandoned for a more radical black power movement, giving rise to the Black Panther Party, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the women’s movement. Black women such as Audre Lorde, in her seminal text Sister Outsider (1984), saw the inherent male-centricity in the black nationalist power movement (Roth, 2003) and the anti-black racism of the women’s movement (hooks, 2005) as a hurdle to their freedoms as black women. What 31.

black women were highlighting were the entanglements of race, class and gender (Davis, 1981).

Intersectionality is a term that was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) in the late 1980s in the US; initially used in a legalistic sense to show the particularity of black women who were under- or misrepresented, and thus disadvantaged in civil suits; the concept has come to be applied as a praxis, rather than a theory (Yuval-Davis, 2006). In this sense, intersectional thinking challenged Western epistemological traditions which treat structural issues as a distinctly separate arena of struggle. For black women, for example, this praxis is liberatory because it informs a politics that sees black women as black and as women, and as black women. Crenshaw (1989: 139) defines intersectionality as a tool to overcome the single-axis analysis inherent in Western legal systems, which occlude the multidimensionality of oppressions faced by black women. This definition is enlightening because it shows how layered the nature of personhood – and indeed, black womanhood – is, and is thus radical in challenging the binary-prone imperialism of Western thought.

In addition to thinking about the intersectionailty of oppression and domination, Roth (2003) is also of interest here because she further argues that feminist politics are also interstitial in nature, in that they occur within the cracks, in the gaps between nationalist, masculinist and anti-imperial political struggles. Interstitiality is a helpful concept because it shows that feminist organising and political development occur at the margins of socialist or radical movements, eclipsing hooks’ (1984) vision for bringing feminism ‘from margin to centre’. Intersectionality and interstitiality in Black US feminist scholarship have been inspiring theoretical features for women developing their feminisms in newly independent African states (Lewis, 2011). In light of the EFFSC, my thesis holds that, despite masculinism in the organisation, occurring liminaly within the branches is a black radical feminism.

2.4.3. African Feminisms

African women have been instrumental in developing their own feminist theories, praxes, and politics on the continent, before, during and after colonial rule. Ahikire (2014), in her 32. essay, African Feminism in Context, highlights that African feminism was formally developed thirty years ago at the Women’s Conference of 1985 in Nairobi, Kenya, where women discussed issues pertaining mostly to developmental issues in the era of structural adjustment in Africa. African women wanted to articulate their own struggles and imagine their own futures, using their cultural and ethnic frames of reference (Nkealah, 2006). Thus, African feminism is a theoretical resistance to the imperialist and imposing nature of Western feminism (Ahikire, 2014), as well as its gender essentialism (Oyewumi, 1998). It has taken various forms across a diversity of contexts, cultures, economic and political conditions, and African feminist scholars such as Ahikire (2016) and Nkealah (2006) have also argued that, because of the specificity of lived experiences and sociopolitical and economic experiences and realities in Africa, many subjectivities exist and coexist.

Amina Mama (1995) is a prominent scholar in research on the constructive processes informing African subjectivities, arguing that these subjectivities indicate varied sexual identities, lifestyles, and socio-political attitudes adopted by African men, women, LGBTQIA+ and non-gender conforming people in Africa. The very concept of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’ is a contested one; for example, thinking about where non-continental African fits into ‘African’ struggles. Ngozi (2009) relays the sentiments of intersectional feminism when she argues against treating bodies as singular identities, that the ‘single story’ narrative of characterising a female body as women only invisibilises the many subjectivities that women assume, construct and resist. When we adopt this argument in light of the EFFSC, one could argue that the political subjectivity of feminists and women must be explored so as to gain a deeper understanding of how masculinism is, and can be, challenged.

Radical feminism argues that ethnicity entraps the development of women by subordinating them to patriarchal cultural norms, behaviours and modes of being (Kambarami, 2006), while African feminists have argued that culture is not inherently negative for women (Lazreg, 2005). A contradiction arises within African feminism: on the one hand, it advocates for women to articulate their own understandings of emancipation from the capitalist heteropatriarchy (Ahikire, 2016), and on the other, it argues for an 33. embrace of historically patriarchal ethnic and cultural norms and behaviours (Oyewumi, 1998). The latter sees cultures as fixed and unchanging, countering the array of scholarship on cultural change, especially as a result of the legacies of colonialism. For example, Matebeni (2011) shows how the issue of lesbianism is very contentious for lesbians living in Johannesburg, a postcolonial city in which many ethnicities and traditional cultures coexist. The form feminism takes in this setting can therefore challenge or perpetuate the oppressive role of ethnicity in women’s lives and futures (Lazreg, 2005).

African feminists have named the insistence of theorising from the position of the researched – and not the researcher – ‘standpoint’ theory, which refers to a feminism that grapples with the asymmetrical, real life experiences of women (Naidu, 2010: 25). This analytical stance encourages a nuanced understanding of general and specific oppressions, thus challenging the imposition of Western feminisms to universalise their experiences of life and the theories that they construct from these. Such theorists hold the relativist view that “all knowledge is located and situated” (Naidu, 2010: 30), leaving the researcher with the task to centre the experiences and specific subjectivities in the arenas of social, economic, and I'll add, political development. Doing this challenges the hegemony of Western feminist thought, while also highlighting that postcolonial subjectivities are entangled with traditional culture.

2.4.4. Black Radical Feminism

So far, I have shown how radical feminism is enmeshed with black (US) and African feminism in the literature. In this section, I review a selection of literature which marries ‘radical’ to ‘black’, because my reading of the literature reveals a separation of the two concepts. In fact, scholars have reached no consensus regarding the naming of this feminism: some call it radical black feminism (Jagarnath, 2019) and others, black radical feminism (Xaba, 2017). In addition, the radical nature of black feminism is sometimes assumed, and thus under-emphasised. Black feminist scholarship is not necessarily radical in nature; for example, scholars such as Kuanda and Kuanda (2018) make conservative gender arguments that collapse sexuality into male-female categories. This 34.

highlights the potential for black feminism to lean towards less radical analyses and remedies for black women’s liberation. Thus, radicalism must be deliberately developed in black feminist scholarship, or the danger of conflating ‘black’ with ‘radical’ presents itself as an obstacle to the project of challenging the patriarchal politics of erasing and silencing.

Earlier, I defined patriarchy as a system of socially-sanctioned male dominance over women (Firestone, 1972). Now I want to add the factors of anti-black racism, class oppression and heteronormativity, especially in a racialised context such as in South Africa. Xaba (2017) is helpful in outlining the form and nature of patriarchy, arguing that it is the silencing of non-gender conforming sexualities, as well as the erasing of black women’s contributions in history and movements, for example. Within the patriarchal structure of oppression, the contribution of women and girls is erased from the national memory, leading narratives of freedom and national identity to take on a masculinist form (Magadla, 2014). A political analysis of patriarchy is an important part of any radical feminist stance, and should form part of any feminist political project. However, radical feminism has often alienated men, seeing them as natural enemies to struggle against (Ahikire, 2014). This has led some non-Western feminist scholars to argue against the cultural relevance of radical feminism across different social settings (see Ahikire, 2014; and Nkealah, 2016).

The literature varied in its grasp of black radical feminism, and more scholarship is needed on a working definition of black radical feminism. Xaba (2017) was helpful in offering a black radical feminist critique of Fanon’s theory of colonial violence in the context of the FMF’s call for decolonisation, but did not offer a working definition of black radical feminism. Benya’s (2015) logic is that black radical feminism is the practice of writing women into male-dominated discourse. In addition, Roth’s (2003: 49) arguest that black radical feminist politics are interstitial and thus critical of movements’ blindspots. These concepts of the disruption, destabilisation and centering of women is what Brown (2001: 43) calls “the most radical feminist critique of racism, sexism and imperialism”. This is useful here because it describes the black radical feminism that I observed, and was active in shaping in the branch under study. 35.

2.5. Anti-feminism

One of the inspirations for this research was an observation of an insurgence of anti- feminism in the EFFSC yet, to date, no scholarship connects the phenomenon of anti- feminism to the EFF, despite literature on its masculinism (Magadla, 2013) and male bias (Dlakavu, 2018). Anti-feminism can superficially be defined as an aversion to all forms of feminist politics and activism (Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2012). More specifically, scholars have defined masculinism as a specific form of anti-feminism (Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2012), as well as within the context of modern misogyny that preaches a perceived post- feminism (Anderson, 2015).

Anderson’s (2015) book entitled Modern Misogyny: Post-Feminist Anti-feminism explores the theoretical dimensions of anti-feminism, showing how feminism has been deliberatly depoliticised in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Written in the post-9/11 US context, her argument foregrounds the gains made by feminist organising in the 1970s and beyond, in order to show how feminism is irrelevant in a post-sexist society. It is premised on misogyny and individualism, and sees both women’s oppression and the need for collective action against it as part of history, and not being relevant today. Any oppressions that women face, the argument goes, is attributed to the individual characteristics of the women in question, ignoring the structurality of capitalist heteropatriarchy (Anderson, 2015). Anderson is thus useful for showing how post-feminist arguments can centre on a deliberate misogynist watering-down of feminist theories.

In their study of the anti-feminist activism of men’s groups in Canada, Blais and Dupuis- Déri (2012) argue that masculinism is a particular form of anti-feminism, and conceptualise this particular phenomenon as part of a larger social (counter)movement. Men’s groups organised around issues such as stricter laws for divorced fathers who default on child support, and actively targeted feminist groups who they saw as responsible for divorced men’s perceived troubles, threatening feminists’ safety and sometimes vandalising offices. Similar to Anderson (2015), Blais and Dupuis-Déri (2012) see anti-feminism as a sometimes violent reaction to gender justice gains made by the actions of feminists, and is helpful for this inquiry because it connects masculinism to violence against feminism. Scholars attribute anti-feminism to a rise in conservative 36.

politics globally, evident in the increase of populist and right-wing governments in the last ten years (Mbete, 2015). My suspicion is that anti-feminism in the EFFSC is related to masculinism, but also that it is inextricably linked to a larger rape culture in South Africa.

What is missing from these foci is an application of these theories to non-Western settings, on which the literature is currently scant. Ahikire (2014: 21) argues that anti- feminism in Africa is linked to conservative understandings of gender parity, but stops short of analytically exploring its roots and relationships to masculinities and femininities. Despite the agreement that the EFFSC is a masculinist organisation (Magadla, 2013; Dlakavu, 2018), a gap exists in black radical feminist literature in light of the anti-feminism I have observed at play in the EFFSC, and I hope to fill that with an analysis of the data, collected in a non-Western, (southern) African setting.

2.6. Conclusions

This chapter reviewed the literature informing the feminist theories that are useful in forging a feminist political space in the EFFSC. I relied heavily on the seminal works of Dlakavu (2018) and Magadla (2013; 2014) who both argue for the masculinist character of the EFF. Although Dlakavu (2018) has argued that the ideological footing of the EFF is one that is inherently male biased, I have argued that two broad categorisations of feminism can be applied to the EFFSC’s, albeit limited, grasp of gender justice. Firstly, in the class feminisms section, Marxist - and socialist feminism were shown to focus on the interrelated nature of structural gender oppression under capitalism. I started to pick apart the EFF’s Marxist Leninist Fanonian focus and found that, while it possesses a male bias (Dlakavu, 2018), it is not explicitly opposed to gender justice.

Although feminist theory must be deliberately centred in order for a real problematising of patriarchal moorings (Prah and Maggott, forthcoming), there is room for feminism within the EFF’s ideology, to answer Nieftagodien’s (2015: 455) question. Secondly, socialist feminism extends Marxist thinking in that it centres, not only oppression for working women, but also the struggles that they wage around housework and domestic labour. I can safely conclude, theoretically, that the EFFSC’s Marxist feminism is stronger than its socialist feminism, at least at the level of policy and ideology. 37.

In the broad ‘black feminism’ section, US Black and African feminism were disentangled from each other in light of the black feminism being expressed by women in the EFFSC, based on my initial observations and on the work of Dlakavu (2018). I noticed how the literature separates ‘black’ from ‘radical’ despite the change in South African feminisms evident in FMF (Miller, 2016), and I hope that the findings of this research attempt to fill this gap by arguing for a black radical feminism in the EFFSC. This complicates radical feminism’s strong emphasis on tackling patriarchy, a mutually constituted system of socially-sanctioned oppression of men over women (Xaba, 2017).

In addition, literature on African feminism was reviewed, where I outlined the debate regarding the place of culture and ethnicity in postcolonial African women’s lives. On the one hand, feminist scholars argue that culture and ethnicity traps women within fixed patriarchal structures (Firestone, 1972). On the other hand, African feminists have argued that standpoint theory is useful for seeing that ethnicity and culture are not intrinsically oppressive to women, and that resistance to patriarchy can occur within ethnic settings (Lazreg, 2005).

Black feminist scholars have also argued that feminist theory has been dominated largely by white, educated, urban, middle-class Euro-American women, labelling these imperial feminisms (Amos and Parmar, 2005). Earlier, I outlined that the politics of patriarchy are based on exclusion and occlusion; feminism is not its polar opposite. Instead, it is different in form and must be fundamentally based on an intersectional approach to understanding oppression and domination (Kennedy, 2008). Here, Crenshaw (1989) is seminal in moving towards a more nuanced and inclusive feminist politics. Imperial feminisms have historically been lacking in their accounts of the entanglement between capitalism, gender, culture, and anti-black racism. However, definitions of feminism differ across space and time (Whittier, 1997), and as such, in non-Euro-American settings, for example, can pose resistance to imperial feminisms (Ahikire, 2014: 8), or may build on them (Lewis, 2001: 4).

My observations as a branch leader pointed to the phenomenon of anti-feminism, but the literature on this trend within the EFFSC is largely non-existent. On an analytical level, scholars have argued that anti-feminism is positively related to post-feminism, meaning 38. that, since the many gains made by feminists, feminist theory is obselete and actively depoliticised (Anderson, 2015). In other words, as women’s freedoms increase, so does anti-feminist reactions to feminism. Thus, Anderson (2015) links misogyny to anti- feminism. Blais and Dupuis-Déri (2012) further argue that anti-feminism is a masculinist countermovement that seeks to maintain men’s patriarchal power in society. I hope to extend these arguments to a South African setting, since none of these conceptualisations grapple with the intersections of blackness and masculinity in relation to anti-feminist politicking.

As this chapter has shown, feminism is not a homogenous body of thought, differing from context to context, culture to culture, and from generation to generation (Whittier, 1997). As Ahikire (2014: 8) argues: “Feminism is a myriad of theoretical perspectives emanating from the complexities and specifics of the different material conditions and identities of women, and informed by the many diverse and creative ways in which we contest power in our private and public lives”. This formulation is useful because it shows that feminism can and does hold different meanings for different women in different or similar social settings. Having ascertained that, a deeper look into the context in which the EFFSC gender relations and definitions of feminism(s) is needed. Indeed, despite its patriarchal masculinism, women in the EFFSC are developing a black radical feminist critique that reduces the cleavages between race, class and gender. Having laid out the theoretical aspects with which this study’s research questions engaged, the proceeding chapter presents the empirical findings of this research.

39.

3. CONTESTED FEMINISMS: MARXISM, ANTI-FEMINISM AND RADICAL GENDER POLITICS

3.1. Introduction

This and the following chapter present the data collected during the research process and provide analyses of that data using an intersectional, black radical feminist perspective. Coupled with an autoethnographical narrative, the data was analysed using a thematic method, from which five major themes emerged, namely; Feminist arguments and expressions in the EFFSC, specifically, Marxist feminism, anti-feminism and black radical feminism; Gender relations in the branch; EFFSC ideological influences of gender awareness; Rape culture in the EFFSC; and lastly, Women’s Resistance.

This chapter is about the broad theme of how gender politics have taken shape at the branch. The research questions ask how gender relations in the branch shape understandings of the place of feminism within the organisation, and the specific expressions of gender politics in this branch. Within this broad theme, I identified three expressions: Marxist feminism, anti-feminism and black radical feminism. To set the scene, I begin by providing a broad contextualisation of the research site, including the membership profiles of the branch, the rise of the EFFSC in SRCs across South African universities and the experience of student activism for fighters, based, not only on my observations, but my active participation in the EFFSC.

I then explore the three expressions of gender politics that I observed and, to some extent, participated in. These positions are highly contested and cut across gender lines, as they shape and are shaped by each other. Firstly, Marxist feminism in the EFFSC is connected to its larger “Marxist Leninist Fanonian ideological grounding” (Shivambu, 2014: 66) and is thus prominent in its policies, as well as within the views held by some fighters. Foregrounded here are arguments about how capitalism oppresses women and men, particularly black men. Secondly, anti-feminism was observed as a major aspect of gender politics in the branch, coming from men and some women. It is based on violent masculinism which is celebrated in the branch. Thirdly, and in contrast to anti-feminism, is black radical feminism, which branch feminists use to expand the EFFSC’s gender 40. neutral ideology (Dlakavu, 2018). These contestations overlap, diverge, and are symptomatic of larger social, political and gender processes.

3.2. Setting the Scene: The branch and the campus

This section outlines the gender and age profiles of the branch and the rise of the EFFSC in SRCs so as to reflect on the social context in which these issues are located. The research was conducted at a university campus branch of the EFFSC, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The branch was established in 2015, at a university and campus where the ANC-aligned SASCO had enjoyed a monopoly on student politics in general, and over the SRC in particular, since the mid-2000s (Diko, 2018). Through my working relationships with branch leaders, I learned that the branch suffered significantly from the repression imposed by university management during and after FMF. For example, the branch itself and many individual fighters were explicitly named in a court interdict, while others were suspended or expelled.

When I joined the branch in 2017, I was recruited by a man fighter, as are many other women fighters — confirmed in conversations with my comrades. I was elected to the position of branch deputy secretary, later learning that this was because I was new to the space, thus easily malleable to the politics of the men in charge. On Twitter, a woman fighter similarly highlights: “From the moment you get into the organisation, a man is already claiming you as his recruit. This is to form enough of a bond with you to make you their voting cow”. My personal relationships with women branch leaders, and former leaders, confirmed this detail; evidence of how men fighters enjoy a monopoly over the space, because they are in the majority, as shown below. Thus, sexist patriarchal masculinism and gender-neutral political analyses are left unchecked.

3.2.1. Male Monopoly: The intersections of gender and age in branch leadership

My secretary files show that, in 2017, of 304 members, 214 were men, 88 were women and 2 were not classified (due to data miscapturing at the time). Similarly in 2018, of 242 members, 150 were men, 87 were women and 5 were not classified. This is evidence of a clear male dominance and hegemony in the branch and, within this, masculinism 41.

flourishes. However, this is not to say that women are not central to the daily work and political life of the EFF, as Dlakavu (2018) and Essop (2016) have shown elsewhere. This argument can be extended to the EFFSC. Women fighters, leaders especially, perform tasks such as processing paperwork, recruiting new members, managing funds, cleaning the offices, preparing food for programmes when the need arises, managing bus lists to and from extra-campus programmes, and being the face of the branch at its information desk. As a fellow fighter said in an interview when I asked her who does most of the daily work in the branch, “It’s women (very matter-of-factly). For me, I believe, it’s women. When they started the #SizofundaNgenkani Campaign3… At the beginning, it was mostly men, but some of the women started coming, and throughout the year, it’s women who do most of this type of work. Yeah, it’s actually women who do most of this work… Deep down they know, but they would never say it publicly that we need these women, these women are doing the groundwork”. This echoes the arguments of Federici (2012) who argues that the “personal is the political” in that patriarchal modes of being are replicated in the sexual division of labour and power. While men enjoy a constitutive monopoly over the branch, women perform a critical function within the day to day workings of the branch, yet they express frustration and disappointment with their invisibility and lack of appreciation from hegemonic men leaders.

In terms of age, the branch is largely made up of ‘born frees’, South Africans born after 1994. In 2017, the average age of the branch was 25 years, and in 2018, 23. The men leaders were generally older than the ordinary members and were generally more active in other non-political student societies, including RAG, dayhouse committees and Christian student organisations. This is consistent with Essop’s (2016: 85) argument that the EFF’s relationships with civic – in this case, student – organisations shape and

3 The Sizofunda Ngenkani Campaign (“we will learn by force”) is an annual programme that the EFFSC runs at the beginning of each academic year to assist students during the financially (and emotionally) stressful period of registration at South African universities. Fighters form loose and informal working groups to assist students with registration, financial aid and accommodation, all while struggling to register, fund, feed and accommodate themselves. These informal groupings are often structured around existing social networks in the branch and in the larger campus/university community, and the Campaign also functions informally as a recruitment drive 42.

influence its programmes. For example, some programmes were run in collaboration with residences and dayhouses.

Through my political work and critical observations, I noticed that the women leaders were younger than the men leaders, closer to the average age of the branch, for both years. This suggests that women fighters spend less time as fighters and/or as leaders because, as I reveal throughout this and the following chapter, women exit the party due to frustration with sexist masculinism. For example, one fighter expressed: “As you come in, these men already have an exaggerated importance, the women who they have come in with have probably been exhausted and pushed out of the space by them” (woman fighter, Twitter, 2019). When this age dynamic and male dominance are taken together, one can see how power in the branch is configured at the intersection of maleness and seniority. Often, the leading men fighters had been members of the branch since its inception, and had thus established their power over the branch, both electorally and ideologically.

In this branch, the EFF’s 50-50 gender policy was strictly adhered to, such that on a surface level, there seems to be a progressive gender balance in leadership. For example, the 2018/9 SRC candidate list comprised of five men and seven women, myself included. But in light of the sexism and rape culture I outline below, this is not a gender progressive branch. In terms of the 50-50 policy then, women are used as gendered political objects to fill leadership positions to satisfy the 50-50 policy. As this woman fighter expressed, “There is a habit of making diminutives in the space. So it means treating women anything other than leaders, comrades or full members of the organisation” (Twitter, 2019). In other words, women fighters in this branch perform political labour of a gendered type, centred around hegemonic men who dictate which women make the cut. In this male dominated context, therefore, the 50-50 rule is manipulated for the means and ends of the male monopoly.

It is interesting to reflect on the hidden, less visible ways in which the principle was operationalised in reality at the branch. The EFFSC holds firm to the 50-50 gender policy which loosely argues that “no male will replace a female” (Dlakavu, 2018: 48). Elsewhere, Dlakavu (2017) also shows how this is progressive in South Africa’s political landscape, which is shaped by traditions of excluding women from the business of political activism 43.

(Andrade, 2002). For the EFFSC, this mechanism is an attempt to challenge the male centricity that is inherent in political spaces, and it was very well observed in the branch under study, as well as in the CSCT and provincial structures I observed during my work as branch secretary.

As a former man leader of the branch confirmed in an interview (2018): “...when it comes to positions, women are only considered to deputise or treasurer, [or] secretaries. And when we discuss politics of slates, and who to lead and they should lead with who, what, and we go to all these caucuses - women are only there, we only include them as mere gender representation because as you know that the Constitution forces us to include them”. This shows that men used the 50-50 tool to reproduce their monopoly over the leadership structures and, by consequence, the space. It is also telling because it shows that women are confined to positions perceived as less important, and thus less powerful or influential.

3.2.2. From fighters/activists to student politicians/bureaucrats

The context in which this research was conducted was embedded in the rise of EFF-led SRCs across the country. By contesting and winning SRC elections, the EFFSC is changing its self-framing from an opposition student party to one of formal, institutionalised governance. The SRC election process is highly formalised, divided into university-regulated time frames from roughly August to October. During this time, the branch found itself moving from the opposition party to being the ruling student party. It was within this shift, from activist to paid university employee, that the male monopoly over the branch intensified.

As one of the branch’s preferred candidates for the SRC, I experienced this liminality firsthand — not quite opposition, but not yet in formal governance. For example, I wrote in my research journal during the campaign period: “I think that during times of transitions in power two things happen: 1) a dominant cabal emerges, seeking to manipulate the sharing of power so as to control the movement of the organisation towards governance, and 2) the dominant cabal responds violently towards any dissent, including feminism. So it’s almost like the cabal becomes more repressive so that 44.

they can control the outcome of power mongering, and in turn, women and men can feel repressed, excluded and isolated, which radicalises them into resisting the dominant faction” (Journal entry, 2019).

Prior to our SRC victory, internally, problems of power emerged in the branch as the men used their monopoly over the space to control the decisions that needed to be taken. Myself, and other feminist leaders, noticed how the men leaders started to erode democratic practice in the branch. For example, the 2018/9 SRC election manifesto was not drawn up in a democratic way, as I reflected at the time: “As part of the requirements for participating in the SRC elections, the EFFSC must draft a manifesto which it will use to campaign. On this day, the Chairperson ... issued an election manifesto to the SRC candidates’ WhatsApp group, despite earlier talks of a manifesto consultation meeting... A manifesto is supposed to be arrived at through rigorous debate! None of that occured…” (Journal entry, 2018).

It is apparent from this quote that the change in political positioning, from opposition to governance, led to a breakdown in democratic deliberation within the branch, accompanied by feelings of frustration for leaders and members. The run-up to the SRC elections was marked by internal power struggles within the BSCT, in which the male dominance was challenged by women and feminist – and a few men – leaders. Before the prospect of an SRC win, the branch was an opposition party with few institutional (bureaucratic) limits to consider when formulating its programmes. But in winning, the EFFSC shed its opposition skin to become a party of institutionalised governance, and two centres of EFFSC power held: the branch and the SRC structure (see EFFSC Guidelines for SRC deployment, no date). Both were dominated by powerful men leaders who dispensed decisions for and about the branch in authoritarian ways.

Post-victory, the authoritarianism of the men leaders increasingly frustrated women leaders. When the victory was announced, the EFFSC President, a former student at this university, issued a directive that the new SRC should lead an occupation of the campus library to highlight the need for extended library hours. Many women leaders, a few younger men fighters and some students arrived ready to study-in, but the men leaders were nowhere to be found. We later ascertained that they had cancelled the programme 45. without consulting or informing anyone. The women leaders were angry and embarrassed in front of their new constituents. On one level, this reaffirms the idea that women are central to organising and mobilising, but are excluded from leadership positions and decision-making (Gouws, 2014: 120). On another, this is part of a larger pattern of centralised, masculinist leadership that demonstrates how lines of power are deeply gendered. In some instances, women were then radicalised into feminist politics through their resistance to the breakdown in democracy. This radicalisation is important within this context because of the unique political education that students undergo during their time at university.

Arguably, the university experience is a unique period in a young, student activist’s life, because it is within this formal education that new ideas, such as feminism, are explored, deconstructed and consolidated. This experience occurs within a particular context as, Xaba (2017) argues, the university is a microcosm of the society in which it is located, meaning that the branch under study is located within a larger culture of sexist patriarchy and feminism alike. Many of the fighters in this branch hail from rural areas and towns in different provinces. In the focus group (2019), when asked about experiences of sexism and feminism outside the campus, one woman fighter expressed: “This is the societal norm in the township so you cannot come and be disrespectful - they don’t even know that it’s... They don’t even call it feminism”. Thus, at the level of student politics, students are exposed to new ideas, cultures and interactions, and it is within this exposure that feminism is constructed, accepted, developed or rejected. It might then be fair to speculate that the room for feminist politicking is more limited in the larger EFF.

I have shown how the branch was dominated by older male students and how this intersection, and the hegemony it enjoys, are important points of reflection given the context of contesting SRC elections. It was in this becoming, which some fighters called “the SRC-in-waiting”, that the sexism and misogyny reared their ugly heads and flourished in a ‘progressive’ space. This does not mean that the EFFSC is a sexist student organisation run by a few powerful men leaders. Instead, it suggests that shifts in power within the campus’ student politics upset the hegemonic power relations within the branch, forcing the senior-male dominance to clamp down on any dissent, whether 46.

feminist or otherwise. The chapter now turns to an analysis of the particular (anti)feminist views developing in the branch.

3.3. “Capitalism is the ruling centre, capitalism decides what’s power”: Marxist feminism and structure-centric gender analyses

One way in which feminism was expressed in the branch and Student Command more broadly is around issues of structural arrangements in capitalist society. In this section, I unpack the related ideas of a two-stage theory of women’s economic freedom, as well as the idea of ‘giving land to women’. As with Marxist feminism, which argues for an understanding of how women’s oppression stems from the interrelation of production – working, selling labour for wages – and reproduction – birthing and sustaining the workforce or working class – under capitalism (Semotona, 2018), these arguments rely heavily on a critique of how the capitalist system structures society into classes – the capital owning class and the working classes – with necessarily antagonistic relations because of their respective relationships with the means of (re)production.

A great example from one of the interviews follows here: “ ...Economic freedom is essentially the struggle against capitalism. So of course when you fight capitalism as we have set out to do as the EFF, immediately when you fight capitalism, you fight everything that comes with capitalism. You fight the race question, which fights racism. You fight the gender question, you fight patriarchy. You fight inequality, you fight everything. So I think that the gender question, it’s also at the centre because we know that capitalism cannot function without patriarchy” (man former leader, interview, 2018). This shows the centricity of the capitalist economic structure and its relationship to the patriarchal gender structure in this expression of gender politics. This holds implications for struggles toward free education and economic freedom.

In the interviews, fighters almost always evoked racialised capitalism as the main focus of the EFFSC’s mission. For example, a feminist member outlined the EFFSC’s mission as: “to participate in the worldwide struggle for the complete eradication of imperialism, colonialism, racism and all other forms of discrimination” (interview, 2018). This implies a sex-blind and gender neutral understanding of macro oppression, even for some feminist 47. fighters. This is linked to the nature of political education in the branch and broader organisation, which is usually conducted by a man, using race and class theories such as Marxism, Leninism and Fanonism. It is necessary to unpack this ideological grounding because interpretations of it shape the branch culture and its grasp of feminist theory.

The ideological “line of the EFF, Marxism Leninism Fanonism” (EFFSC Constitution, 2015: 2) places a limitation on the potential for feminist ideas to flourish in the party. The particular interpretations of Marxism, Leninism and Fanonism were interesting findings in light of both Marxist- and anti-feminism in the branch. For example, Lenin’s idea of democratic centralism was used almost a warning to limit dissent and enforce what fighters called “revolutionary discipline”. This quote from an interview (2018) with a man former leader captures my point: “Democratic centralism is used to ... avoid dissent, especially in the upper structures. So what happens is that the upper structures impose decisions on the lower which is essentially how democratic centralism works but then it’s been abused to where leaders just abuse their positions and their influences in certain structures where they serve towards their own ends”.

Revolutionary discipline becomes a discursive tool of punishment and subservience to hegemonic leaders. It could be argued that Lenin’s organisational principle of debate and consensus-reaching has become a function of patriarchal masculinism, to police dissent and maintain authority in the branch. This reduction and selective application of Leninism can be attributed to a lack of branch political education, but when viewed from a feminist standpoint, one could argue that hegemonic leaders deliberately used theory as dogma, to squash dissent. When that dissent takes a feminist position, those feminists are labelled as enemies.

Fanon’s theory on political education, which speaks of regular mass political education as a way to build mass political consciousness (Fanon, 1963: 126-127), was largely ignored in the branch, and political education was not prioritised programmatically, despite the EFFSC’s writing of political education: “Learning or education is an active process that requires members to self- develop and seek clarity where they don’t understand or feel confused. 48.

Finally, the political development of each member is a revolutionary responsibility of all engaged in struggle” (EFFSC Constitution, 2015: 8).

Throughout the dissertation, I have been agreeing with Dlakavu’s (2018) argument that the EFF centres race and class struggles, and sees gender oppression as supplementary to those. In addition, gender oppression was seen, not only as supplementary but as incidental to racist capitalism. This further implies that, for the EFFSC, gender politics are an unnecessary arena of ideological and political struggle because, as the argument goes, when socialism is achieved through a revolution of the working class, patriarchal practices will automatically fall away. The following quotes capture my point: “The west always comes up with stupid struggles like feminism to shift our focus from the real struggles like poverty Black People being taken as inferior. Black women and men are equal in that they are poor, landless and are enslaved by the Capitalist system” (man branch member, Facebook, 2018). “Patriarchy remains one of the manifestations of capitalism and as a result both black men and women are a result of the system which allows them to behave as such” (man branch member, WhatsApp, 2019). However, as the history of South Africa has shown, when sexism and masculinist patriarchy are not directly opposed, they reinvent themselves (see Prah and Maggot, forthcoming), even in self-proclaimed progressive spaces.

As a result, race and class struggles are prioritised (Dlakavu, 2018), and women’s economic emancipation was seen as (co)incidental to the fall of capitalism. In other words, when socialism is achieved, women would automatically be liberated, since their oppression can be attributed to the capitalist economic structure. This implies a two stage theory of gender justice. I found that, for many fighters, both men and women, the source of women’s economic freedom is located in the dismantling of capitalist society. This is very interesting for this study, because it shows how capitalism is overemphasised in gender struggles in the EFFSC, and sexism is actively under-prioritised. The following post demonstrates my point: “You also want to get rid of violence against women? Be active in dismantling capitalism, capitalism enforces violence against women because it enables the idea of private ownership and dominion over the 49.

woman body. In a market system that privileges males, the household as the smallest unit of society copies the antagonistic relations of labour between capitalist and worker, man and woman” (man former leader, WhatsApp, 2018). Here, the current economic structure is foregrounded as the major obstacle to women’s economic freedom, but what this focus occludes are the ways in which the social relations between men and women (re)produce sexism at a human level.

Such views were not only coming from the comrades I interviewed, but also from EFF policy: “...The EFF believes that women's economic emancipation is the first genuine step towards the ending of patriarchy; thus, the attainment of economic freedom in our lifetime is essential to the struggle against patriarchy” (EFF, 2016). What is shown here is a “lack of ideological clarity when it comes to gender” (Dlakavu, 2018: 41). A more intersectional approach will be useful in showing how the economic structure reifies sexist patriarchy and, thus, how human agency is important in reproducing or resisting such oppressions.

This limited critique of how labour and (re)production are gendered under patriarchal capitalism fits the EFFSC within the anti-apartheid trade union activism of the 1980s. Hassim (2017: 219) is useful here in showing how Marxist feminism, also called workerist or materialist feminism, as a theory informed how, and what, working women organised under apartheid. She argues elsewhere that “in the trade unions, women developed leadership and began to articulate the linkages between women’s class oppression and their gender oppression” (Hassim, 2006: 21). As Shivambu (2014: 154) notes, “the EFF believes that gender-based violence and related anti-social activities are reinforced and even sustained by the deplorable conditions of our people, therefore a key to female emancipation is the emancipation of all”. Interestingly, this sentence appears almost verbatim in the EFF 2019 Election Manifesto, five years since Shivambu (2014) published this. This suggests a recycling of gender ideas and language.

I refer to the previous social media post in which the fighter treats relations between men and women as incidental to capitalism, and correctly so, echoing what activists such as unionist Chrissie Jasson and others were arguing in the 1980s and beyond (see Mail & Guardian Special Report, 2016). But this earlier expression of Marxist feminism emerged 50.

within the context of the national liberation struggle, into which women’s struggles were subsumed, and often prioritised as being less urgent than the struggle against colonial/Apartheid rule (Hassim, 2006). In a drastically different socioeconomic and political period, a new position on gender must be formulated. The EFFSC’s current goal to expropriate land without compensation must also be taken into account when thinking about victory against gendered capitalist oppression.

In the mother body, women’s economic oppression is linked to issues of land dispossession and ownership; the latter a central component for women’s economic freedom. For example, “in rural South Africa, women are not allowed to own land, which restricts access to break from the cycles of poverty and landlessness in their lives” (EFF, 2016). While this extends the debate about capitalist oppression to one that includes problematising land ownership, this is also a two-stage theory: Women’s freedom will be achieved when black people expropriate ownership of the land that was stolen from them during colonial conquest. The following was a common sentiment in EFF discourse, and thus a kind of axiom in the Student Command: “Malema ... called for women to be given land and said that if land was given back to black people‚ women must get at least 1ha of land each. ‘When we give women land, we’re guaranteed that the children will be fed. Let’s give South African women the land‚ the most oppressed people. We must make sure that women benefit from this land. This land must not benefit politicians.’" (Mthethwa, 2018). Here, when women are “given land”, patriarchal oppression will end. This is an interesting take on the land debate as it extends the debate to women’s economic freedom, a positive finding, yet it obstructs the agency of women in being part of the land struggle, rather than receiving it passively.

But, similar to the argument that an automatic end to patriarchy will unfold once capitalism is dismantled, the argument that women will be free from gendered oppression once “given land” is evidence of a cognitive structural analysis rooted in a mechanistic view of change in society. Socialist feminist theory is useful here for thinking on various levels of abstraction about how gender oppression can manifest in a post-capitalist world (Masita, 2018). A mechanical understanding of dismantling patriarchy is not intersectional in 51. nature, and lacks a critique of the entanglements of racism, capitalism and patriarchal masculinism. A more dialectic approach to gender analyses located within Marxism is necessary in showing how “giving land” to women necessarily means grappling with the systems of oppression that sexism is tied to, such as chieftainship over rural lands, from which women are excluded from owning.

Women and feminists in the focus group and interviews expressed aversion to these structure-centric analyses, arguing that some men in the EFFSC use racist capitalist oppression as a way to evade thinking about how they are complicit in perpetuating violence of a gendered type. I quote, at length, a statement from the focus group that shows how men ideologues in the branch, and broader party, centre race and class struggles in order to construct gender struggles as secondary to these, as well as employ arguments about the capitalist oppression of black men to avoid accounting for their sexist behaviour. It is important to note that this quote was shared soon after hearing about a second bout of rape allegations against a leader with tremendous influence over the branch: “[I]in student politics, I think there’s an understanding, although selective, of what rape is and the culture it comes from. So when you say you’re a feminist because you stand against rape, sexual abuse, etcetera, they’ll tell you you’re not looking at the root of the matter. So they’ll tell you ‘but that’s how white people came into this country. They came by raping women and children and that’s how black men understood power’. So now they make it a matter of it’s something they learned from those who oppressed them, that in order for you to have power, you need to instill it or enforce it through rape. So by dealing with them you’ve gotten to the root of the matter. In fact, they [black men] are victims of this culture. So they understand that there are certain things that come from a culture of imperialism but when the coin is flipped and you question their behaviour and their strong alliance to patriarchy, they don’t want to understand because you are shifting the playing ground ... so now they only understand it where they are victims, where they are socialised into those things ... they were subjugated into or something they were forced into to say, ‘but the ruling centre is capitalism, capitalism decides what’s power’ ... So if you don’t deal with capitalism, then you’ll never deal with rape. So 52.

it’s blame shifting! It’s scapegoating!” (feminist branch leader, focus group, 2019, emphasis added).

What is highlighted here is how structural gender analyses fail to account for the violent gender relations that underpin the political lives of women, such as rape and rape culture, and how black men are perpetuators of that violence. What these analyses obstruct is how black men are agentive in reproducing sexism, patriarchy and rape culture in today’s societies (Xaba, 2017). Structure-centric analyses rely on the skewed assumption that black men have no agency in challenging capitalist oppression. When the economic structure is overemphasised, human agency is limited and eclipsed, and in this case, sexism and other gendered oppressions continue unabated (see Prah and Maggott, forthcoming). Therefore, oppressive gender practices, such as catcalling and body shaming, persist in this seemingly progressive space.

I conclude this section by arguing that an over-emphasis on the capitalist structure is used to question patriarchal oppression, as well as to evade the ways in which we, as fighters, perpetuate oppression in our branches. What is needed in EFFSC policy and practice is an ongoing, reflexive, intersectional analysis of how the current neoliberal economic crisis is deeply gendered, and how these oppressions persist in a so-called revolutionary space. The Marxist feminist arguments I observed in the branch also overlap with anti-feminist politics, in that anti-feminists in the branch crudely argue that women’s freedom is not relevant to the struggle against capitalist oppression.

3.4. “The feminists of this branch are useless, power hungry idiots”: Anti- feminism in the branch

Relying on Marxist feminist arguments about racialised capitalism, as well as blatant sexism and misogyny, anti-feminism in the branch was a second major subtheme about the place of feminism in the EFFSC. Anti-feminism can simply be defined as opposition to all forms of feminism and feminist politics that is linked to a masculinist outlook (Blais and Dupuis-Déri, 2015). I found that anti-feminist politics conceive of gender as a non- issue in the larger socialist project, is a function of gender violence and violent masculinity, and is loosely linked to an abhorrence of intellectualism, as well as to a small grouping of 53. self-proclaimed anarchists in the branch and broader student organisation. I provide examples of each aspect throughout the subsection.

Linking to Marxist feminism in the EFFSC, anti-feminist expressions are based on a critique of the racialised capitalist system, in its particular manifestation in South Africa; but instead of using this argument to understand gender oppression for women, the oppression of black men is priorised over black women’s. For example, as this Facebook (2018) post of a man leader captures, “Where are black men? Visit all jail cells, prisons and rehabilitation centres for a case study. Where are black men? Visit all the mortuaries in Soweto on a random weekend and hear how they got there. Where are black men? In the streets of the ghetto and urban slums diced by Nyaope, Whoonga and all other substances they are not responsible for. South Afrika is not having an honest conversation about gender relations in this colonial enclave that is a criminal creation to maintain its history of violence against all its subjects”. Here, black men are postured as victims within a white supremacist capitalist order. On the one hand, there is acknowledgment that, through various socio political processes, such as the migrant labour system, black men were emasculated by the racialised project of capitalist Apartheid. On the other, this anti-feminism relies on actively invisibilising black women’s experiences of oppression.

However, anti-feminism diverges from Marxist gender analyses with its emphasis on actively opposing women’s and feminist organising. As a woman fighter posted in a Twitter thread, “women who attempt to organise themselves outside of men, tend to get isolated, demonised, insulted and often left out of the political scene”. Whereas Marxist feminism is about liberation from capitalist gender oppression, anti-feminism is about actively vilifying feminism, feminists and a perceived feminisation of black masculinity. In response to the surge in black radical feminism in the EFFSC, the following quote from a leading man’s Facebook (2018) post, captures my point: “The idea is to feminize us so that the white-capitalist patriarchal can reign free. To us the struggle is economic freedom. That means that the mothers of this revolution will take hands with the black man and defend the future of our born and unborn children”. 54.

Here, feminism is positioned as an enemy of black emancipation and a threat to black masculinity. Economic freedom is seen as the main project of the EFFSC, and feminism is seen as an ideological enemy of that project. Also of interest in this quote, is how women are reduced to mothers of born and unborn children, married to the nation. As Anderson (2015: 63) highlights, a goal of anti-feminism is to reduce women to their reproductive abilities, so as to sustain perceived male superiority. This might be linked to the branch’s young age profile — most of the branch members were born after 1994, and might see women’s liberation as achieved, as Anderson (2015) suggests in her framing of anti-feminism in light of post-feminism in contemporary US context. More research is needed about the attitudes of born-frees to feminist politics.

I noticed that gender struggles were not prioritised in the branch, or were actively depoliticised and thus detached from the twin struggles for economic freedom and free education. An example of this is how the branch’s 2019 SRC election manifesto failed to include the feminists’ idea of a rape treatment centre for the campus. This idea was pursued by women and feminist leaders in the branch, myself included, but in the final draft of the manifesto, it was discarded (see EFFSC SRC Election Manifesto, 2018). Women leaders, myself included, organically know the critical importance of the need for such a resource because they experience a lack of support from the university when they, or other students who have been raped, approach them for assistance. Anderson (2015: 4) is again useful for higlighting how “anti-feminism erases structual inequalitiy in that any discrimination against women that does still exist is viewed as a singular case of mistreatment against individual women”.

The EFF’s Treasurer General, Leighann Mathys (2019), has shown how women fighters bear the brunt of inter alia supporting their women constituents who have been raped, and these findings support this. As I know through my activism in the EFFSC, “women ... call us at all hours of the night asking for help because of rape or abuse” (Mathys (2019). Thus, when anti-feminist sentiments emerged in opposition to the call for a rape crisis centre on the manifesto, the sexualised violence that women students and fighters experience on campus was delegitimised, and specific cases of rape were individualised, thus stripped of their structural injustices. 55.

Another way in which women-centred issues were reduced in political importance and urgency was by relegating such programmes to the Women’s Month of August. Feminists in the interviews reinforced my own experience of this, by highlighting how women and feminists are called on by hegemonic men to perform gendered political labour, such as assisting rape victims, housing destitute women students and “performing” feminism at EFFSC events. Thus, regulations and boundaries are imposed on feminist organising. For example, as a focus group fighter outlined: “[certain men] like to think of themselves as ideologues and theorists, so they’ll say “Yeah I agree with the first wave and the second wave of feminism, but not with the third wave, you’re going insane”. There’s a bracket of feminism that they are willing to accept so long as they don’t lose their political standing in terms of power. So, if you’re a feminist who still believes that men are better leaders, then they [men] can deal with that because that doesn't take away any privilege from them. So then that feminist is approved” (2019, emphasis added).

This subtle form of anti-feminism is based on sexism and misogyny which regulates the nature and scope of what is an acceptable framing of gender justice to the hegemonic men. Hobson (2016: 2) sheds light on how women activists in this age of visibility feminist politic are shaped by the performace of defiance against patriarchal oppression, meaning that there is a certain bracket of feminism that is acceptable to beneficiaries of the male dominance, as this illustrates: “So there were fighters in the Student Command who were saying that, no, this is too extreme a level of feminism because you can’t be telling young girls that this is my vagina [Naledi Chirwa’s campaign for women’s agency]” (feminist leader, focus group). In this case, women are allowed to perform their feminist challenges to sexism and toxic patriarchy, but only within limits set by the male hegemonic powers.

Furthermore, feminists were constructed as hypersexualised women. This rumoured hypersexuality was used to further delegitimise feminism, evident in how men leaders sometimes called feminism ‘febenism’. In the Zulu language, the word ‘ufebe’ means ‘whore’, and thus, the naming of feminism as ‘whore’-ism indicates that anti-feminism relies directly on shaming women and their sexuality and perceived promiscuity. Feminism is thus detached from the EFFSC’s projects towards free education and economic freedom. For example, women are ‘slut shamed’ on social media and via 56.

rumours. An economy of rumours was a vital aspect of sustaining anti-feminist discourse, as this WhatsApp post (2018) by a woman fighter shows: “I just heard a comrade saying an entire leader of my branch is generous ka vagina (shocked face emoji). I’m shook, I don’t know what to say of such, I can’t tolerate men who think or say such of female comrades”. Here, slut shaming forms part and parcel of the branch culture, and feminists expressed their disgust for this, as this social media post exemplifies, “They smile with her and everything and then immediately she goes away they say such about her (crying face emojis, broken heart emoji) it’s tough shame, she might not be my friend but I won’t tolerate such behaviour from these men”.

As Gqola (2015: 38) asserts, shame is a function of oppression. In this example, feminists were shamed via false accusations of promiscuity. Given that the sexual activity of feminists is often not public knowledge, the truth of the rumours is of no significance. Instead, oversexualisation is used to shame and dehumanise (Gqola, 2015: 38) feminist fighters. Respectability paradigms function to control who “speaks about [what] and under what conditions” (Mupotsa and Mhishi, 2009: 100). Feminists are not constructed as respectable, and often we did not find expression in meetings and programmes. Feminism thus loses its political legitimacy in the branch because it is painted as an ideology associated with sex hungry, thus un-respectable, women. This more overt anti- feminist trend in the branch was particularly interesting to me because of how unashamed anti-feminists are on social media and in person. It required little visibilisation because of its public nature.

Furthermore, anti-feminism also depends on ideas of rapeability, in that feminists were sometimes formulated as sex-hungry and thus unrapeable. This renders feminists and assertive women vulnerable to more violence when they “talk back” against oppressive gender experiences. Gqola (2015: 31) argues that some women cannot be raped. This is not to say that they are not raped, but that the signifier of “raped” does not apply to all women equally — they are impossible to rape. I noticed that when feminists and women gender activists were raped, their stories were not believed, thus they were unrapeable. 57.

To protect the identity of the women in question, I will refrain from quoting social media posts, but in 2019, one feminist fighter posted a reflection of how her EFF comrade raped her and none of the men fighters believed her. Whereas the threatening phone call and cyberbullying below are milder forms of a deep ideological abhorance to feminism and feminists, the signification of feminists as unrapeable is a harsher type of sexual violence located within violent masculinism as a function of anti-feminism. It renders feminists vulnerable in this political space and allows violent masculinities and masculinism to thrive. To be provocative, I can argue that, while anti-feminists often claimed that “men hate women”, this evidence suggests otherwise, that some EFFSC men deeply hate feminists.

Less brutal but nonetheless worrisome manifestations of anti-feminism were rife in the branch. For example, a fellow feminist fighter told a group of us that she, a contestant for a top position in the branch’s upcoming elective conference, had received threatening calls from a mysterious male caller late the previous night, threatening her to stop lobbying. She expressed fear for her safety, yet resolved to continue fighting against the male hegemony, which many fighters, men and women, called ‘the cabal’. Threats to women and feminists only occurred when they attempted to assert and organise themselves; otherwise, we were largely excluded from decision-making, even those with top leadership positions.

Feminists were also faced with cyber bullying and, as one self-identified “almost feminist” leader said in an interview (2018), the effects of bullying on feminist leaders are unknown: “...I think she’s [a vocal feminist leader] one of the people who’ve went through that type of bullying, but she’s human at the end of the day. She might appear strong to all of us but we don’t know what she goes through when she’s alone. But that’s still bullying. You don’t have to cry to show you were bullied; that you were treated bad. You can still continue appearing strong but the fact that they did something, I feel it’s bad. The way she has been treated. Rumours being spread...”

One particularly jarring Facebook post (2018) by a young man fighter sums up the violence metered out against feminists who attempt to assert their politics outside of the dominant male cabal: 58.

“Ground forces must lead everyone, not only a niche of fatherless, anti- African, dick sucking, pseudo-feminist, ANC blessers, sympathisers, excited late adolescents with a lusty and greedy thirst to lead. We want a ground force to lead our branch, he/she who has served, sacrificed and suffered for the EFFSC”. I was unsure where to fit this quote into the analysis because it is so loaded with issues. Firstly, it shows how feminism is perceived as anti-African, as a Western ideological import, or further, as an enemy of the EFFSC, thus the assertion that feminists must be receiving monetary rewards from the ANC, which is often positioned discursively and programmatically as an enemy of the EFF. Secondly, the use of slut shaming is blatant and is linked to the feminists’ perceived lust for power. Here, slut-shaming functions to link feminists to the ANC and to being power hungry. Thirdly, it seems merit is only given to those who sacrifice their time and energy for the branch, ignoring the “underground” (Mashego in Dlakavu, 2018: 100) political tactics women employ to further the interests of the organisation.

This anti-feminism cannot be seen as isolated and indeed the culture of disregard for intellect that I observed at the branch forms the basis upon which anti-feminism is constructed and consolidated. There was a clear decline in political education and cadre development during the time the data was collected and indeed, the anti-feminist leaders that I observed perceived of any intellectual project as a form of assimilation to middle class values, separating activists from their working-class constituencies, for example. In contrast, “groundism” or “ground work” was seen by some branch members as “the right way to do politics”.

Groundwork refers to the day-to-day political work of fighters, including but not limited to, helping students find accommodation, giving financial and academic support to struggling students, providing material support to hungry and/or financially precarious students, actively participating in programmes and protest action, and informally debating current issues. It is interesting in a Marxist Leninist Fanonian organisation that revolutionary theory and practice are distinguished from each other. As one leader told me in an interview (2018): “It’s ... a very stupid debate and it doesn’t exist. They are trying to create a dichotomy where it doesn’t exist, right? It was Lenin who said, there can 59.

never be a revolution without revolutionary theory. Like you will have a revolution and with theory, they will go hand in hand. Praxis, and all that. So comrades are trying to create this dichotomy, and I’ve told them when I addressed them that is stupid”. Hegemonic leaders hold a monopoly over the political theory and development in the branch, so their ideas find expression. As a man leader noted of comrades who actively oppose theory in politics, “the problem with a groundist movement which has no ideological or political posture is it’s limited to bread and butter issues and fails to answer greater societal questions” (WhatsApp, 2018). This also had implications for how ‘economic freedom’ and ‘free education’ was understood.

The idea of ‘economic freedom’, as I uncovered, was an “omnibus” of arguments (Nieftagodien, 2015: 448) of inter alia state capitalism, protectionism, (African) nationalism and political careerism. The EFF’s Seven Cardinal Pillars4 also retain an exclusive focus on economic justice, failing to see the intersections of this with gender justice. Restricted by the confines of this dissertation, I will not spend time unpacking these individually, but I will argue that, despite the progressive self-framing of the EFFSC, anti-feminism infiltrated the fibre of this particular branch, that was simultaneously misandrous, homophobic and based on an African nationalism (Nieftagodien, 2015: 452; Ashman, Levenson and Ngwane, 2017: 77). This limited the scope for feminist politics in the branch and broader party.

‘Free education’ was constructed as a necessary struggle, a fight, and thus a political process towards a certain type of justice. It was almost dogmatic and based almost wholly on material conditions associated with the current neoliberalisation of higher education,

4 According to the EFF’s constitutions, “At the centre of the struggle for economic emancipation are the following seven non-negotiable cardinal pillars; 1. Expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution. 2. Nationalisation of mines, banks, and other strategic sectors of the economy. 3. Building State and government capacity, which will lead to abolishment of Tenders. 4. Free quality education, healthcare, houses, and sanitation. 5. Massive protected industrial development to create millions of sustainable jobs. 6. Massive development of the African economy and advocating for a move from reconciliation to justice. 7. Open, accountable government and society without fear of victimisation by the State Defence, Police and other Agencies. These seven non-negotiable cardinal pillars will constitute the core program of the government of the EFF and all its structures outside government at branch, regional, provincial and national level” (EFF Constitution, 2014: 3). 60. such as fees and accommodation. For example, the final SRC Election Manifesto consisted of the following elements: longer campus bus and library operating hours, free registration, scrapping of historical debt and more academic support for students. Similar to FMF, these demands centred on the materiality of being a student in anti-black institutions (see Gillespie and Naidoo, 2019: 193); but unlike FMF, it missed any grappling with bigger issues such as freedom from Eurocentric curriculum, or why the university’s language of instruction, English, seriously hinders student development. This sharp focus on “bread and butter” issues is a result of how the relationship between theory and practice was dichotomised by fighters who subscribed to the ideology of anarchy.

I noticed an ideological footing that fell outside the EFFSC’s formal ideology, which is that of ‘anarchism’. The anti-feminist men leaders in the branch themselves expressed their ideological preference for anarchism on social media, for example; associated with a central leader – a man who was not a registered student nor elected leader in the EFF or SC – who often donned a bulletproof vest in public, embodying an aggressive, authoritative masculinism. Fighters sometimes nickname each other after famous revolutionaries and this particular man was called Bakunin, after Mikhail Bakunin, a notable nineteenth century socialist anarchist from Russia. For men of this faction, anarchy is associated with disrupting meetings as a form of expressing dissent, staging spontaneous protests and practicing a black – read black men – essentialism. For these ‘strong’ men ‘anarchists’, feminism was seen as an enemy, and gender politics in general was seen as supplementary (Dlakavu, 2018) or completely unrelated to the main struggles of class and race. This anarchism seems misplaced in a political party premised on democratic centralism, and my suspicion is that it is confused with violent masculinism.

A culture of ideas, learning and reading/writing are not prioritised in this political space, even in an institution of higher learning. Indeed, as Andrade (2002) points out, there is a relationship between writing and resistance, or rioting. The EFFSC’s website was under maintenance for the entire duration of this research and the only policy documents, opinion pieces and statements from the party came from its first cohort of leaders, in the period from 2015 to 2017. Writing as a form of defiance is not valued in this branch, nor in the larger organisation during the time of study. Not one policy or discussion document 61.

was issued by the CSCT, evidence of a clear trend towards groundism which, I observed, relies on creating a distance between theory and practice, writing and rioting. The form of protest that the branch did undertake usually revolved around masculine, aggressive expressions of defiance, for example, the shut-down method. Anti-capitalist language is used to label theory as an elitist project. This speaks to the issue of violent masculinism in the EFFSC because it is essentially an argument for aggressively rejecting ideas so as to maintain power, rather than engaging collectively with ideas in the pursuit of revolutionary mass action.

Feminism is seen to pose a threat to the masculinity of black men, a masculinity which is seen as strong, aggressive and absolutely superior to women regardless of their race or political experience. The relationship between feminists and hypermasculinity is a negative one simply because feminism and feminisation are seen as threats to hegemonic masculinity. I also noticed that this prescribed masculinity was also premised on age, with men being superior to boys. I reflected in my journal (2018): “I noticed that men fighters use the word “boy” to tease each other. Almost as if it is an insult, a belittling of manhood as a marker of his identity. Interesting. It seems that this is a manifestation of a rigid masculinity based on superiority (ie man versus boy) and heterosexuality (i.e. man exists in opposition to woman; men are superior to boys who are then superior to women and girls)”.

From this, it seems that any form of dissent against this hegemonic masculinity, whether it is one of age or gender, is viewed by hegemonic men leaders as an enemy of black liberation. To me, this suggests that the masculinity at play is not tough, strong or impenetrable, but rather, is weak, fragile and thus in constant need of defending, rendering the anti-feminist tendency that I observed ideologically flimsy and practically violent and dangerous to dissenting women and feminists. It is not grounded in theory or tactic, but in defense of a perceived (gendered) power of black men relative to women, that constantly works to silence and exclude women from politics.

This anti-feminism fits into Blais and Dupuis-Déri’s conception of anti-feminism as a form of masculinism in social movements, as well into Anderson’s (2015) argument that links it to post-feminism and modern misogyny. But my findings diverge from these theoretical 62.

conceptions in terms of dealing with race and sexuality. For example, Anderson (2015: 50) argues that the liberal legislative gains made around antidiscrimination and sexual harassment laws have led anti-feminists to argue that feminism is outdated. However, I found no theory that deals with how and why black men in non-Western settings are so opposed to feminism. The findings point to how feminism is seen as a Western ideological imposition; thus an enemy of black economic freedom, because it has the potential to upset the heteronormative gender binary from which men receive their legitimacy over women (hooks, 1984). In contrast to this, is the emergence of black radical feminism at the branch level.

3.5. “This is a picture of a womxn base kas’ lam disrupting”: Black Radical Feminism in the EFFSC

Another way in which feminist ideas and politics are constructed in the EFFSC can be self-characterised as black radical feminism. Despite the EFF’s masculinism and gender neutral (Dlakavu, 2018) socialist analyses, coming from the branches is an observable black radical feminist politic. The defining characteristics of this expression of black radical feminism assisted in consolidating this growing literature (Brown, 2001). These include post-memory and remembering, centering women’s agency in political discourses, intersectionality/interstitiality, and critiques of ethnically sanctioned violent masculinities, as well as the 50-50 gender parity rule. These five aspects are explored in detail in this section.

Firslty, a defining feature of the black radical feminism being constructed within the EFFSC is what Gqola (2010) calls post-memory, whereby feminist fighters actively evoke the importance of women leaders in history, whether contemporary or other, in order to disrupt the moorings of patriarchy which erase and silence the contributions of women in the EFFSC. This post-remembering directly challenges the EFFSC’s inherent male- centric memory. In congruence with Nieftagodien’s argument that the organisational memory is located within the nationallist memory of the ANC (Nieftagodien, 2015: 451), I found that, in media releases, social media posts and in conversations on the ground, the teachings of Thomas Sankara, Frantz Fanon, and Steve Biko are prominent in the 63.

branch’s political education and memory. Indeed, this fits into a larger pattern evident in FMF, for example, where students memorialised mostly men activists, thinkers and aggressive, masculine forms of protest (Xaba, 2017: 101).

Part of remembering is forgetting, and seemingly, the EFFSC forgets that Sankara prioritised gender progressive politics, such as mass workshops for men about gender education. Part of what masculinism does is to construct women as secondary to men using male-centric language and ideas (Magadla, 2015). When women are remembered in the EFFSC, they are either not African, such as Assatta Shakur, or as mothers of the nation, such as Mama Winnie Mandela. African women, non-ANC women and single women are forgotten in the EFFSC’s collective memory, which is further evidence of how masculinist discourses filter into the fibre of the organisation.

In contrast, when feminists (re)memorialise women such as Queen Nzinga, a warrior- ruler, they challenge the notion that women are ‘roses of the revolution’, mere onlookers and service providers for the real – men – fighters. I quote at length a WhatsApp (2019) post by a feminist branch member: “Black radical feminism is theory and action in motion. It is born from the lived experiences of our mothers, grandmothers, ancestors and ourselves. They will demonise us with big English trying to convince us that what we are doing is European, stunts the black liberation movement and that it is self mutilation. We will remember our grandmothers who work the land and carry our families, we will read about Queen Nzinga and celebrate her victories, we will hold on to the moments when patriarchy tried to bury us alive - and poetry from black radical feminists ventilated our heavy chests. This is a picture of a womxn base kas’ lam disrupting. Re-affirming that: A rapist who is a successful business man is still a rapist! A rapist who gets released is still a rapist! A rapist who shares holy communion with me is still a rapist! #Blackradicalfeminism #Blackradicallove” (woman branch member).

This post-remembering is politically important because of its revolutionary potential to deconstruct and reconstruct the EFFSC’s very notions of ‘free education’ and ‘economic freedom’ in that it destabilises the gender-neutral visions of emancipation (Gqola, 2010). The first three sentences of this quote show that, in contrast to anti-feminist insistence on 64.

avoiding ‘theory’, for this feminist, ideas are important and meshed with action, as integral to, and not disconnected from it. This was posted during the SRC election victory when a prominent EFFSC leader was accused of rape for a second time. Acts of sexualised violence in the organisation can thus radicalise women into feminist politics. That this man’s first accusation of rape was mishandled organisationally such that he progressed from branch Chairperson (not this branch) to a candidate for the EFFSC Presidency, angered us, and some women were revolutionised into reading more feminist literature and developing ideas ‘on the ground’, while assisting students.

The quote also questions the broadly accepted notion that feminism is a Western import to Africa, as many men and ‘patriarchal princesses’ argued. By reclaiming and reappropriating feminism as a praxis for, and by “womxn base kas’ lam”, the notion that feminism remains an intellectual task for academics is unsettled (see Hassim, 2017). In essence, feminist fighters are both remembering beyond the confines of national liberation – by constructing women as full political subjects, not mothers, wives or relative to men – and appropriating feminism from Western women. This also links to women’s agency in political struggle and society more broadly in that it speaks to how women and feminists use re-remembering so as to centre women in leftist student politics.

These black radical expressions of feminism foregrounded the agency of women individually and as a group. The EFF argues for the triple oppression theory (Shivambu, 2014: 164) which highlights three structural barriers to women’s emancipation, namely anti-black racism, heterosexism and poverty (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 195). Critics have argued that the triple oppression argument reduces women to a state of perpetual victimhood (see Roth, 2003). In opposition to this, is black radical feminism, which shows how women actively resist their interlocking oppressions, going from victim to empowered. In this conception, women are active, conscious agents and resistors of their intersecting oppressions, not only discursively, but within the EFFSC political space, as this qoute from an article by Naledi Chirwa, a prominent leader and unashamed feminist, writing about a programme she led at a certain campus: “On that day we went in with the women and broke it down, practising black radical feminism in the spaces that we occupy; saying that males must not come was a very powerful position. The leadership of the EFF in 65.

the SRC said “this is a gathering for women, and for black women in particular,” and it was really successful. The message was basically about agency” (Ebrahim, 2017a).

The media and certain feminists have attempted to portray black women fighters as “unknown female leaders” (Magadla, 2014), and as missing from gender debates about the EFF (Davis, 2019). It is important to note the larger history of liberal feminism in South Africa, because it was, at times, steeped in anti-black racism (see Hassim, 2017) and continues to be discursively associated with white, middle class women (see Jagarnath, 2019). Here again, black women resist erasure from black men and white women (see Jagarnath, 2019). But the research at the branch reveals that EFFSC women are indeed problematising the rape apology, sexism and sexual violence that men fighters participate in, and benefit from. I discuss these issues in the following chapter about gender relations in the current context of neoliberal capitalism and hypersexualised violence in South Africa.

A third aspect of black radical feminism in the EFFSC is its critique of ethnicity in the (South) African context. The social media post above, about the womxn base kasi disrupting, coupled with my own knowledge of the gender relations in the branch, indicate that women are proudly African and proudly ‘woman’. The countless uses of the word ‘womxn’ in social media posts show that women in the EFFSC are also acutely conscious of their blackness, African-ness and their womanhood and, in turn, draw on this layered identity as a source of pride, collapsing the perpetual victim thesis (see Roth, 2003). However, the women in the branch are also rejecting patriarchal notions of womanhood, which frame them within ethnicity as property or gendered objects, as well as challenging power relations that reduce them to such. As this WhatsApp post (2019) by a feminist branch member shows: “I’m still at odds with my folks about being lobola’d. That shit is a trap. The concept that will lead a man to assuming that I belong to him on the basis of having put a lame monetary value of my life just nauseates the hell out of my liberation as a young black womxn”.

In doing so, women are thus problematising fixed, rigid ethnic oppressions as functions of systemic patriarchy. This highlights the radical nature of this black feminism in 66. foregrounding and challenging an important formative aspect of socio-political and economic life ⁠— ethnicity. Women fighters are therefore stretching, perhaps rupturing, the limits of African feminism, which has at times attempted to tame radicalism in ethnic settings (Lazreg, 2005). This links to how black radical feminism can expand the EFF’s current limited grasp of gender justice, in that it resists the traditional barriers to women’s economic freedom, such as owning land and maintaining control over the economic self and the ‘female’ body.

Fourthly, while an expression of black radical feminism was evident within the gender politics of the EFFSC branch under study, part of this included an emphasis on gender equality. When asked the question “What do you think of when you hear the term ‘feminism’?” in the interviews and focus group, many answered along the lines of, “feminism is essentially about equality between men and women, and the freedom to choose” (woman member, focus group, 2019). I was not completely surprised by this because contemporary society has come to think of feminist theory as concerned with equal choice (Bhandary, 2016), but a part of me was surprised with the frequency at which I heard this term because, to me, it seemed liberal, rather than radical. On the one hand, women identified gender parity as loaded with the potential to sustain, rather than challenge, patriarchal sexism, and on the other, they use the notion of equality as a building block of their black radical feminism.

Largely, this was not a wholly liberal notion of equality and, at times, it took on a more radical critique of how women have been dehumanised in society and in political spaces, more specifically. Equality is seen as a way to empower women within the current oppressive context of gender inequality. For example, as this quote shows: “Everyone must be treated equally. It can’t be that because I’m able to bare a child, and for three months I go home, I take leave and now suddenly when I come back, somebody’s higher than me, now I’ve lost — no” (women leader, interview, 2018). What this shows is that, in contrast to a liberal focus on individual equality and freedom of choice, equality is used here as a way to question the perceived inferiority of women relative to men, and to rehumanise themselves. 67.

Women and feminists use equality to rehumanise themselves; in other words, pursuing gender equality is a way to de-gender women, taking them from gendered beings to human beings, taking them from ‘woman’ to ‘activist’/ ‘leader’/ ‘fighter’. Mathys (2017 in Dlakavu, 2018: 100) captures this when she highlights that “we must ask the men why they just keep thinking they are so good when they are not”. As another quote shows: “I think that women must occupy positions not because they are simply women, but because they are deserving and because they are capable of doing the work. And if a woman is capable of doing the work then she must occupy the office that she is capable to run” (feminist leader, interview, 2018).

Equality also extended to sexual freedom, beyond the liberal framing of equality within the man-woman binary: “Feminism is about equality, having the freedom to partake in whichever space whether socially or economically ... and not be hindered by your gender… But also it spreads far beyond gender and also includes sexual orientation because now in some spaces, you can’t take part because even though you have the correct gender in that specific space still your sexual orientation would make it a place of exclusion for you. So for me feminism is the freedom to partake politically, socially, any other way, regardless of your gender or sexual orientation” (feminist branch leader, focus group, 2019).

My own black feminist bias led me to conceive of equality as a liberal notion that misses the realities associated with structural (capitalist) oppression; hence, I was forced to engage more deeply with how an emphasis on equality can also lean towards a more radical conception in the context of radical feminism. However, ‘equality’ is not to be conflated with equal rights, which is essentially an argument for liberalising legislation without tackling structural patriarchy (Boles, 2006: 5). The women and feminists of the branch use gender equality as an aspect of their black radical feminism, which is then strengthened with a more radical critique of hetero-patriarchy, anti-black racism and neoliberal capitalism.

Finally, this feminist expression is intersectional in nature, and is thus a valuable praxis to the EFFSC’s larger politics. It is more than a politics of identity, but a tool which can 68. build a more nuanced understanding of economic freedom and the strategies that inform that struggle. The following quotes aptly capture the intersectional language employed: “It’s as if there’s a distinction between feminist and political when feminism is actually a political topic because that is our space in society. It’s hugely political because it is an ideology that is fighting for people who are at the bottom, being black and female, which is perhaps the toughest identity a person can carry because everyone else is above you in sort of the hierarchy of power” (feminist leader, interview, 2018). “I think gender fits everywhere. It fits in free education and everywhere, because if you are saying that we are fighting capitalism, if we are saying that we want to overhaul the social order and everything then there’s gender involved. And gender is like that elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And especially in the EFF” (man former leader, interview, 2018).

The thematic method revealed a recurrent sentiment regarding how intersectional feminism is centred on an understanding of how various levels or sources of oppression interact to create particularly oppressive experiences which are embodied. For example, “Indeed the struggle of women is universal and in one way or another similar. Let us take this day to remember the struggle of our African and international Queens, those who fought against patriarchy, against white supremacy, against gender based violence, against rape, against child abuse and against apartheid. Let us work to build one another as women in Africa and internationally” (feminist branch member, personal correspondence of feminist literature, 2019). Issues of imperialism, racism, sexism and internationalism are all linked to oppression of other kinds.

This is important because it diverges from the EFFSC’s structure-centric gender analyses by centering gender oppression within struggle, thus encouraging a re-thinking about, not only how women are oppressed, but how men and women relate to each as gendered beings within the context of structural oppression, exploitation and domination. That black radical feminism is intersectional is not an original finding in theoretical terms; black feminists have used, overused and misused this concept (Lazreg, 2005), but this finding in light of the EFFSC’s political journey is important, and the party’s Marxist- and anti- 69. feminists are presented with an opportunity to rethink their analyses of South Africa’s current economic crisis, which is deeply gendered (Dlakavu, 2018: 35; Gouws, 2014: 118).

Not only is the branch’s black radical feminist element intersectional, it is also interstitial. Interstitiality refers to feminist politics that occur within the cracks of oppressions, between gender, race and class (Roth, 2003). This echoes hooks (1984) thesis that feminism must be brought from the margins to the centre of left politics, and this message is so important for a radical student party still forging its gender politics. In the context of the clear male dominance in the branch membership base, it is not surprising that feminists must necessarily organise at the margins of the branch’s politics. But equally, the centre must open itself up to this recentering, thus political education of a less male-centric kind is needed. Linked to the intersectionality of their experiences as black women in a male dominated space, is the interstitial nature of conducting feminist politics in a masculinist organisation. It would be interesting to see, through research, how this plays out in broader EFF (not student) structures.

3.6. Conclusion

This chapter presented the findings and analysis of the data collected during the research process. I opened the sectioned with evidence to suggest a young, male dominated branch both in terms of age and politics, easily influenced by the politicking of men, who dominate the membership base and the branch’s ideological and programmatic trajectory. I then traced the three most observable (anti)feminist politics in the branch, arguing that feminism is a highly contested theory in the branch.

Firstly, I analysed the Marxist feminism stemming from the branch leadership, at least in theory, and the larger party political line. This expression of feminism situates the EFFSC within a longer history of Marxist feminism in the trade union movement against the apartheid regime (Hassim, 2006). This feminism is constructed within the organisation’s larger Marxist Leninist Fanonian political education, confirming Dlakavu’s (2018) argument that gender is seen as a supplementary domain of struggle. This current gender analysis is mechanistic, failing to account for the smaller processes that form part of 70. struggling against gender oppression. This view also ignores how patriarchal masculinism is perpetuated in the branch.

Secondly, I analysed a largely under-researched area of anti-feminism in the EFF which intensified from Marxist feminist to anti-feminism when feminists attempted to assert themselves in the run up to the SRC election. I concluded that anti-feminism is based on a larger culture of anti-intellectualism, violent masculinism and a deliberate depoliticisation of gender politics in relation to economic freedom and free education, discussed more in the following chapter. It relies on violence sexism and slut-shaming to sustain the hegemony of powerful men in the branch.

Finally, I uncovered the intersectional and interstitial black radical feminism emerging from the margins of the branch. In contrast to the former two, this feminism hinges on unbalancing patriarchal masculinism by constructing a new memory of struggle, thus centering women and their agency. It also uses an aspect of equality to gender, and thus, re-humanise women.

What underpins these three divergent expressions of feminism are the gender relations at play within the branch, an equally important consideration in building a movement towards economic freedom. That the EFF is a masculinist party (Magadla, 2013) cannot be disrupted, but emerging from within at least one of its branches is a developing radical black feminism that the party leadership can no longer ignore, because of its potential to expand the current gender neutral analysis of capitalism and anti-black racism (Dlakavu, 2018). To answer Nieftagodien (2015: 455), there is space for radical feminist politics in the EFF, as this Student Command branch displays. The following chapter analyses the ways in which the socio-political processes informing these three expressions of (anti)feminism influences their development.

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4. ANTAGONISTIC GENDER RELATIONS, RAPE CULTURE IN THE EFFSC AND WOMEN’S RESISTANCE

4.1. Introduction

The previous chapter presented an analysis of the particular understandings of (anti)feminism in the branch under study, namely Marxist feminism, anti-feminism and black radical feminism. This chapter presents an analysis of the data relating to the gender politics that these expressions of (anti)feminism give rise to, and are shaped by. The thematic analysis foregrounds three important broad themes relating to the sociopolitical processes that shape the branch’s relationship with feminism: Gender relations within the branch; Rape culture in the branch and larger party; and the ways in which women and feminists resist rape culture and patriarchal masculinism. Throughout the chapter, I draw on relevant literature that assists in making sense of how the larger sociopolitical context shapes and influences the gender relations that I observed and was impacted by.

Firstly, I analyse the antagonistic relations between men and women fighters, which are based on heteronormative ideas of (un)acceptable and (un)resepectable masculinities and femininities. Here, I argue that patriarchal masculinism and problematic masculinities not only persist in the branch, but are actively groomed and rewarded. Secondly, I look at how the larger rape culture informs the gender landscape at the branch. Using evidence, I uncover a pattern of sexual abuse, rape and rape apology which in turn radicalises women into feminist politics and/or facilitates the resignation from the party. The final theme analyses the ways in which women and feminists resist masculinism and rape culture, which they do by reclaiming the space and their bodies, and creating feminist networks of solidarity and support. Throughout, I link these themes to the (anti)feminist expressions from the previous chapter. 72.

4.2. “If I tell people I am feminist, I am ridiculed for it”: Gender relations in the branch

The gender relations between men and women fighters was an important theme to emerge from the data, because it showed firstly, how the larger culture of sexist heteropatriarchy is not deconstructed within the political space of the EFFSC, resulting in an increase of fear, anger and feminist radicalisation for some women and feminists in the branch; and that debates about feminism in the EFFSC are informed by anatagonistic gender relations between women and feminist leaders and men who held a monopoly over the branch, which is informed by anti-feminism.

4.2.1. Sexism and toxic masculinity

In the same way that antagonistic relations between the capital-owning and working classes define life under capitalism, relations between men and women are necessarily antagonistic within the heteronormative capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984). This research concedes this view, showing that, in order for men to be socially and politically positioned as superior beings, women within the EFFSC must then necessarily be inferior. Fighters who I interviewed expressed disappointment with how they had joined the branch with the hope that it would be a safe space in which invisible oppressions would be dismantled, including sexism and misogyny. For example, a feminist leader said in the interview (2018), “joining the EFF I expected it to be a place where I could be fully black and fully who I am, which is a feminist activist who believes in Socialism”.

Instead, many shared experiences of sexism and disappointment with how women fighters are sometimes treated. For example, “They kind of radicalise you through the way they treat you like crap because you are a woman, and then when you stand up for yourself and you go outside that mould of a respectful woman, they just deal with you and isolate you, yeah, and they tell you you’re disrespectful” (feminist branch member, focus group, 2019). 73.

Firstly, this quote shows how women experience sexism at the branch level, and secondly, how they are radicalised into feminism when they “stand up for [themselves]”. Also highlighted here is the notion of (dis)respectability in relation to womanhood.

Linked to constructions of ‘woman’ was the idea of respectability, and this was not deconstructed in the branch. Instead, it was actively perpetuated, especially during the SRC campaign period and post-victory. I noticed how women took responsibility for cleaning the branch office and setting up tables and documents for political programmes. This is what ‘respectable’ women fighters are supposed to do. After we won the SRC elections, a food programme was run during examinations, to help feed hungry students, and the women handed out tea and coffee and served students food. Largely, men had been responsible for devising the programmes, but the women, feminists included, handled logistics and running the programmes — an almost unspoken agreement played out, in a seemingly progressive space.

During my research and time as a branch leader, I encountered, observed and sometimes challenged the toxic form that masculinity takes. Toxic masculinity is a performance of manliness that has dangerous and violent consequences for the bodies and environments over which that masculinity is exercised (Matebeni, 2011). Morrell et al (2012) argue that masculinities in South Africa are not homogenous, but can be centred on traditional understandings of manhood and/or more modern conceptions. In addition, Mfecane (2010: 2) is useful for highlighting how masculinity is dynamic and changes depending on the social context. In the branch, men themselves are also questioning the type of masculinity that many men in the branch perform, as one of the men leaders outlined in an interview (2019): “Patriarchy has like this idea of what a man should be and what a man should not be; how a man should act, how a man should not act; what constitutes a man. But to me, what has been like, what has been outstanding for me about patriarchy is that patriarchy doesn’t allow us men to be in touch with our emotions because we are not strong if we are like that. We are told men must not cry. We are told that we can’t be emotional. And if you are not emotional then you are not human”.

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What this type of masculinity does is to taint the space, changing it from one that is free, open and safe, to one that is emotionally draining, un-democratic and dangerous for the sexualised bodies of women fighters. This is not, however, specific to the branch, but links to the larger system of patriarchal dominance under capitalism, where men and women are constructed in terms of aggression and docility, respectively. Witnessed here was how antagonist gender relations, based on prescribed notions of (toxic) masculinity – and femininity – have reinvented themselves in the EFFSC.

The character of masculinity at play in the branch is shaped by the larger context of masculinity at the campus itself. Both the management and its private security espouse a masculinity that is harshly repressive, and it is in this environment that the EFFSC branch is located. For my Honours research, I interviewed seven students from the university where this research was conducted, and found that the repression against FMF was particularly harsh and violent there (Maggott, 2017). In its aftermath, heightened security is the order of the day on the public campus: biometrics, security checks and big, burly men, or ‘bouncers’ as students have come to call them (see Xaba, 2017: 100). Bouncers are the foot soldiers at the campus, displaying a repressive and violent masculinity which students must navigate daily. I expressed similar thoughts in my journal, “In the meeting, we spoke about inter alia the presence of bouncers who are basically regulating the registration and late enquiries process. We all express disdain at their ubiquity, force, and aggressive power. We are all familiar with the terror they bring when pepper spraying us protesting students, chasing us and throwing tear gas at us... For me and some of the other women in the branch, the bouncers are a source of toxic masculinity and we hate how they use their power to restrict our entrance and movement to and on the campus. We hate how unashamed they are in monitoring our action” (journal entry, 2019).

For Morrell et al (2012: 22), one form of hegemonic masculinity in South Africa centres on ethnically and culturally defined notions of male authority, organised around the idea of chieftainship. More prevalent in rural areas, this masculinity contrasts another South African masculinity identified by Morrell et al (2012), one characterised as urban (read assimilated to middle class whiteness), gentlemanly and shaped by English coloniality. 75.

Many of the branch members were from rural areas, and many were from urban centres such as Johannesburg and Durban. Thus, it is fair to say that two masculinities were at play at the branch, fitting it squarely within the larger context of toxic masculinity, not only at the campus, but in the city and indeed the country at large.

This shows a larger culture of toxic masculinity, not specific to the branch but in which it is embedded, and within the university, as a function of repression. Not only is the branch dominated by men, but the Office for Student Affairs of the university, with which the SRC works very closely, was also populated by mostly men — one of the seven senior directors was a woman. Prah and Maggott (forthcoming) show how universities in post-1994 South Africa are structured around race and gender lines, with white people or black men forming the majority of executive and academic management. Black women are underrepresented at the level of the university management as well as in student politics, at least in this branch. This suggests that the broader societal configuration of gender/power permeates all aspects of university and political life for feminist fighters. Thus, sexism and misogyny go unchecked in the branch, because it is normalised within the campus, university and the larger society.

4.2.2 Normalised gender antagonisms and a ‘war on women’

Within the EFFSC, and indeed in the society, gender antagonisms are normalised, leading the EFF’s chief ideologue Dr. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi to argue that “South African society must confront the harsh reality that in it, there is a normalised patriarchal war against women rooted in a hatred of women” (EFF, 2017). He asserts: “A society where a pregnant woman gets gang raped by 11 men around the Nelson Mandela bridge is one where violence and hatred against women has become the norm. Only in a society where rape and violence against women does not get punished do such barbaric acts become normalised” (EFF, 2017). Coming back to the branch level, my research journal is full of reflections of how sexist behaviour by men leaders towards women and feminist leaders was never formally dealt with, and thus normalised. A common phrase in my notes was: “Nothing ever came of this [particular incident of sexism, misogyny or homophobia]” or, “No action was taken.'' 76.

This has led to a branch culture of not holding sexism accountable, for example, one male leader repeatedly called women students bitches during groundwork and was later elected as SRC chairperson.

As a result of the normalised gender antagonisms, women fighters experience fear and anger towards men and women who perpetuate these oppressions, whether ‘on the ground’, or in formal decision-making. In an example outside this branch, women fighters expressed frustration at having experienced sexual abuse within the organisation: “According to the statement, this is not an isolated event. ‘In our own branch, multiple womxn have been the victims of physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse at the hands of people we have come to know as our comrades’ the statement read” (Ebrahim, 2017c).

This quote is important because it shows firstly, that women are not safe in their private spaces nor in their chosen political spaces, as Gqola (2015) shows, and as a result, they experience fear and anger which underpins their interactions with certain, indeed many, men fighters. But gender is also understood as a relational phenomenon (Mfecane, 2010: 27). In this context, male hegemony and sexism are normalised on one hand, but on another, women also create meaningful relationships with their male comrades. So the antagonistic aspect of the gender relations I observed is not a fixed aspect, but dependent on the context and nature of interactions.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it shows that women and feminist fighters receive no support around sexual abuse from their men fighters, within a self-framed anti- sexist organisation (EFFSC Constitution, 2015: 5). Indeed, women have distanced themselves from men fighters who have committed gender injustices in other branches: “The womxn of the EFF said they had failed to garner support from their male comrades against violence on womxn’s bodies” (Ebrahim, 2017c). Similar incidents were reported here in the branch, leading me to notice a pattern of sexual abuse where men with violent masculinities are not checked, and sometimes are actively promoted through the ranks.

This ‘gender war’ language was commonplace throughout the interviews, social media posts and party statements. For example, Commissar Ndlozi said in a statement with refreshing gender diction, “South African society must confront the harsh reality that in it, 77.

there is a normalised patriarchal war against women rooted in a hatred of women” (EFF, 2017). However, men often spoke about the ‘war on women’ as something ‘out there’, away from the branch. Many were unable to see how they perpetuated sexist patriarchy, and when women engaged them about it, they reverted back to their anti-feminist misogyny (Anderson, 2015), ending conversations and throwing insults at feminists. For example, a feminist leader said in the interview (2018), “even though they say they agree with the ideologies of feminism, I doubt that a lot of them do any introspection to see if they in fact are actively feminist or actively anti-patriarchal. You know, it's just rhetoric”.

Others evoked Marxist feminist arguments where they allotted the toxicity of black masculinity to capitalist oppression, evading accountability for their own behaviours. For example, a more senior woman leader said in the focus group (2019) about where men locate their sexism, “...black men are the way they are because of racism. So they manipulate your mind into thinking that what they doing is not because they’re conscious of what they’re doing, what they’re doing is because of the white man; so they shift the blame. And that’s how it becomes toxic because when you go out of that space, now you get exposed to different things, you see things differently and now your mind is like, you know and shaken, because perhaps you get sexually harassed, you in your mind will not blame the black man, you will blame the white man because the black man is dispossessed”.

4.2.3. Roses, Rocks and Regality: Constructions of ‘female fighters’

Furthermore, femininities are not deconstructed, and women fighters are often stuck in the cult of femininity (Gqola, 2007). Within the binary framework, women fighters are seen as gendered subjects, second to men and not considered as guerillas, as men fighters often refer to each other as, but as “roses of the revolution”. Image 2 below shows a tweet by Godrich Gardee, a Top Six leader of the EFF. Women leaders have challenged this framing (see Mathys’ reply on Twitter in Image 2). This is telling of the type of woman fighter constructed in the EFFSC — as a rose, a fragile and beautiful flower that needs constant pruning or taming. I have had trouble making sense of the analogy, and constantly rejected the term. 78.

Image 2: A tweet from Godrich Gardee and the response from LeighAnn Matthys, concerning #Rosesoftherevolution on Twitter (2017).

Women are also constructed as imbokodo (rocks, boulders), an idea popularised during the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings against the extension of state-issued passbooks for black women, with the phrase “if you strike a woman, you strike a rock” (see Akpan, 2015). This positions women as strong, resilient yet inanimate beings, able to withstand any amount of hardship. In this framing of women as hard, inanimate objects to be used as tools to build solid foundations within society, is an idea which paints women as strong and only strong. It erases Tamale’s (2011) argument that women are also 79. sensitive, resistant and agentive forces within society. It also occludes the agency of women in the struggle for economic freedom in that their perceived inanimacy forebodes a half-baked analysis of the place of women in revolutionary politics.

Furthermore, women fighters and women in general were revered as godly and regal. Women are also regarded as queens, especially African queens: “How can you forcefully eat what is yours, because my late queen was all mine”. This is from the former boyfriend of the late fighter Khensani Maseko, who committed suicide because her boyfriend had raped her repeatedly (Pijoos, 2018). In this example, ‘queen’ is used to show an inferiority relative to the ‘king’ who owns her — she is his, to be consumed at his whim. This term was also used by feminists in the branch, in an empowering sense, captured in this WhatsApp post (2018): “Shoutout to the girls who haven’t felt like themselves lately, however you get up every day and refuse to quit. You are strong, you are beautiful and you are resilient. Shoutout to the Queens”. Similar to the ‘black girl magic’ concept, this phrasing is used to empower black women against a “backdrop of racialised and sexualised violence [in order] to reframe” the subjugation and domination that black women experience (Hobson, 2016: 2).

In contrast to the image of a strong, empowered black women, is the image of the patriarchal princess or queen, which is viewed by feminists in a more pejorative sense: “The problem with patriarchal queens is that they are used to being submissive because of the way they were raised. They choose to accept that men should lead no matter what” (woman branch leader, WhatsApp, 2018). This quote employs the same monarchical reference used above to empower women to belittle and problematise pro-patriarchal women. Thus, men were not the sole source of patriarchal oppression in the branch; indeed, women were complicit in their own oppression, and feminists were opposition to both men and women. However, I noticed that feminists still had hope for these women fighters because they are women, and are thus vulnerable next to the hegemonic men. The expression “you don’t need a penis to be a patriarch” was a common phrase repeated by feminists when describing “patriarchal princesses”. A patriarchal princess, I learned, is a woman who endorses and benefits 80.

from pro-patriarchal political discourse and believes that “feminism is [an] enemy of black unity” (journal entry, 2018).

Black unity, here, is used to erase gender justice from the EFFSC’s twin projects of economic freedom and free education, positioning feminism as an enemy to black liberation from anti-black racism and white supremacy. This echoes the same agenda to depoliticise gender oppression of anti-feminism. These women in the branch position themselves as beneficiaries of patriarchy, and at least two of them in the branch have gone on to become leaders of the BSCT in 2019. Not only are these women active in suppressing feminist foci on gender justice, they are actively opposed to the empowerment of women in society. For example, a common utterance in the branch was, “I cannot be led by a woman”. Thus, feminists face opposition from men, as well as women. Yet, like feminists, such women are also a minority but, unlike feminists, their politics are positionally closer to the ruling centre of patriarchal masculinism, not interstitial.

These romantic notions of women as roses, queens and gods do not however extend to feminists, who are thought of as agents, a “third force come to destabilise the branch” a common term that is used (noted in research journal, 2018). Feminists are reduced to troublemakers and “sellouts” which, in turn, strips them of their radical element, relegating them to the role of enemy as is consistent with anti-feminist misogyny (Anderson, 2015). This reduction is linked to the ways in which women are, or are not, thought of as worthy political opponents or allies. For example, I was told by a man leader that “I cannot be led by a woman; in fact, a woman cannot even be my enemy”. Women and feminists are thus simultaneously too inferior to be full political allies of the hegemonic men, as well as too un-respectable to be enemies. Women are thus always, and only, gendered subjects who exist for the ends of patriarchal masculinists.

A common utterance in the interviews and focus group was “I was never a feminist but these men push me”. Furthermore, “Would you believe me if I told you I was forced by circumstances and experiences to become a feminist?” (feminist member, WhatsApp, 2018). Seemingly, sexism, misogyny and anti-feminism radicalised women fighters into feminism. Miller (2016) writes about the ‘necessary scream’ that people, particularly 81. women, often undergo when awakening to feminism, and this phrase supports her theory. Women are frustrated, angered and maddened by the sexism that they experience, and in this case, they become conscious of structural oppressions under capitalist heteropatriarchy, and then radicalised into feminist politics.

In slight contrast, Govender (2009) argues that institutionalised patriarchy, for exmpale in social movements, constrains feminist critiques of power. However, the data here suggests that through their experiences of sexism, feminist fighters were encouraged to think more deeply about their role in the branch as women. In addition, they were able to develop a deeper analysis of the current patriarchal-neoliberal crisis. Thus, it can be argued that debates about feminism are underpinned and shaped by the ways in which men and women fighters relate to each other at the human level.

4.3. “You endanger us when you act like rape or abuse is something to look past”: Rape culture in the EFFSC

Another major theme emerging from the data was that relating to rape culture, which Maxwell (2014) defines as “a culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are blamed for their own assault” (Armstrong and Mahone, 2017: 101 in Bashonga and Khuzwayo, 2017: 36). This section starts by exploring less violent forms of rape culture, such as sexism, misogyny and homophobia in the branch. Next, it moves to more overt instances of rape culture, which is rape apology and threats to assertive women and feminists, such as cyber bullying, rumour mongering and sexual violence. Here I further consolidate the pattern that I witnessed, of sexual abuse in the EFFSC and the consequential radicalisation of women into feminist politics, or their exit from the party. I end the section with an analysis of how angered, disappointed and frustrated women are by the normalised sexist culture, which links to the following section about women’s resistance in the branch. 82.

4.3.1. Sexism and misogyny as branch culture

In the branch, sexism was a daily occurence, as all the focus group and interview respondents noted. When I asked a feminist fighter if she had ever experienced sexism in the branch, she simply answered, “always”, indicating that, she continued, as women and women leaders, “we have to fight twice as hard as men because we still have to prove ourselves... We still have to fight all the time just to be recognised as leaders” (interview, 2018). Sexism is normalised, as I have argued above; “... sexism and misogyny generally, to me they are a daily thing, a daily experience” (man branch member, interview, 2018). Such sexist attitudes make up the fibre of the branch.

Indeed, Myeni (2018) has argued that sexism is a rite of passage in the EFF, and these findings concede with this view, with sexist men in the branch being rewarded with positions in slates by the hegemonic men. I observed benevolent sexism (Anderson, 2015), whereby men policed women’s political attire, for example, and more hostile sexisms (Anderson, 2015), such as one of the most common sexist remarks uncovered during this research, which was: “I can’t be led by a woman”. I first heard this during my time as a leader in 2017, in response to rumours that a woman would be contesting the position of branch chairperson. It was steadily repeated throughout the observations and interviews, both by men and ‘patriarchal princesses’. As a man comrade told me in an interview (2018), “These things happen most where we expect a progressive environment and that’s where you’ll see sexism. I’ve heard male comrades saying that we can’t be led by a woman. I’ve heard male comrades saying that even when we speak about national politics, they can’t imagine having a female president, because what if she’s on her period and she’s having moods? Or she’s pregnant - what is going to happen”.

Sexism was also linked to misogyny and homophobia. Misogyny is expressed as sexist remarks towards women leaders, and as homophobia towards gay, lesbian and non- gender conforming fighters. In Image 3 below, a social media post by a man leader, open homophobia towards transgender women is displayed publicly in the caption, “This is normal. The society must accept that these are women trapped in men’s bodies. This can be our president as the entire country”, followed by laughing-face emojis. This indicates 83. that hatred for women is coupled with a hatred for those who step outside of the prescribed masculinity outlined above. As one man comrade highlighted, when men do attempt to centre gender justice in their politics, “we are accused of being close with gays” (interview). Gendering bodies in a hateful way like this leaves them open to overt forms of violence, such as rape (Gqola, 2015).

Image 3: A social media post by one of the male branch leaders, showing ANC members in party regalia.

4.3.2. Defending and rewarding violent masculinities

Rape apology, the act of defending rape and rapists, where acts of sexual violence are excused, occluded and rewarded (Gqola, 2015), was common with members and leaders of the branch. In addition to the normalisation of sexism, anti-feminism and antagonisms towards women and feminists, rape was normalised and victims of rape were decentred from the narratives that did surface. For, example, accusations of rape surfaced at the branch in 2017 and again in 2018, both against the same man leader. Many branch men did not see this as an issue. As one feminist reflected, retelling the thoughts of a man at the branch: “[the men were] embracing [known rapist], defending him, saying ‘But it was his girlfriend, so we don’t meddle in people’s relationships’” (interview, 2018). In the second case, the woman fighter who was raped was missing entirely from the narrative. 84.

Here, rape is excused using the accused rapist’s personal life, as distinct from his political life, to downplay the seriousness of his sexual violence. Feminists were saying that the two cannot, and should not, be distanced, echoing Lorde (1997) who argues that the personal is political. This erasure blurs the boundaries of what constitutes rape, by separating the personal from the political, leading to a grey area of what is consensual sex in an intimate relationship, and what is rape. This apology also individualises rape, mystifying its structural elements (Gqola, 2015).

Rape apology can lead to a larger rape culture, in which sexual violence is normalised, invisibilised and perpetuated (Bashonga and Khuzwayo, 2017: 44). Cases of sexual violence were numerous during the course of this research. They troubled and frustrated myself and other women. The following quote demonstrates how justifications of rape unfold ‘on the ground’: “Well, in my experience, OK as the Student Command, I can’t say anything within the Mother body. Within the Student Command, most of the times, they just sweep it under the covers. They don’t address the core issue. All they’ll do, they’ll go on social media and say, yes we believe her. Yes But when they are together as comrades, they don’t actually touch base on the issue. Some of them actually laugh about it. They just laugh about it, saying no, she wanted it. How can you rape your girlfriend. I heard someone who said, no, how can you rape someone who you’ve slept with before? And for me, that was disgusting because you being my husband or you being my boyfriend does not totally give you a free pass to my body. So being it if you are dating, if you are in a relationship, whatever, that doesn’t give you the right. A ‘no’ is a ‘no’. We can be married and you can still rape me” (feminist member, interview, 2018).

To answer Myeni’s (2018) question, there is a pattern of sexual abuse in this branch and beyond. Powerful men in the branch, usually former, currently presiding or upcoming and potentially incoming leaders, are excused from rape and sexual violence because they are powerful, and thus do not fit the signifier of rapist or abuser, as Gqola (2015: 35) argues. Accounts of rape and abuse centred on the character of the men in question, thus erasing the ‘victim’ from the story, diminishing her person and reducing her to victim status 85. or ‘raped’. When raped women were brought in to the conservations, it was only to accuse them of “character assassination”, as the discourse went.

In the case of the branch, of the three men I know who were accused of rape or sexual violence, they were able to dodge all consequences because they were powerful, well established leaders, relative to the younger women they abused and raped, and in fact, these women only entered the accounts and debates that arose from this as victims and as character assassins. Here, the EFFSC’s “war against women” (EFF, 2017) language is conveniently forgotten and substituted for the tired ‘third force’ rhetoric, which seems to be employed whenever male dominance is questioned — for example, during the SRC campaign, an alleged ‘third force’, a member of the branch, was said to be spying on fighters. Myself and other women were was also accused of being “feminist agents” many times.

Thus, instead of the rapist or abuser being taken to justice, he is heralded as a survivor of an assassination attempt on his character, political life and future, particularly if he is closely connected to the powers that be. For example, in the focus group (2019), when the facilitator asked the question of how rape is dealt with in student politics, a senior- ranking women leader said: [When I suggested that] we need to go and open a case [of rape against a fighter who raped a woman fighter]… yuh, I would have males coming to me saying ‘no, you can’t say that; you can’t write a statement saying that. You can’t go with that person and open a case because... they are not guilty, it’s just an accusation’... Depending on the influence that person has in the organisation itself, that will determine how they deal with it”.

One could argue that rapists and sexual abusers in the EFFSC are rewarded when they display this type of aggressive and masculinist leadership. There is a pattern of sexual abuse: when a powerful man rapes or sexually violates a women comrade, he, and/or his followers, uses his social capital as leader to divert attention away from his violence, thus the narrative sticks and he emerges unscathed, ready for his promotion through the ranks. Not only is the leader left unscathed, also the understanding of what counts as rape is left untouched, as I observed. And the pattern continues... 86.

In August of 2018, Khensani Maseko, a fighter from the branch at a different university committed suicide, leaving behind a social media post indicating that she had been frequently raped by her boyfriend which in turn drove her to suicide. There was a heated, gendered debate within the branch WhatsApp group, with men, and pro-patriarchal women at times, pitted against women and feminists about what rape can mean within the context of personal relationships. This led me to conclude that, within the branch, there is a gross misunderstanding about what rape is, as Gqola (2015:40) also argues is true for the larger society. Women and feminist fighters highlighted their own experiences with rape ambiguity in the following responses: “I remember asking one of these so-called cadres in our spaces and playgrounds to actually define what rape is. What is rape? And he actually said to me, ‘rape is someone taking away your dignity forcefully’ … It’s not sex because sex has to do with consent. So it can’t be sex. It’s someone taking away someone’s dignity. Then he said, “yes I agree with you, it’s that person taking away your dignity but if you had sex with this person before, this person can’t rape you” (feminist branch member, focus group, 2019). “I had a conversation [with students] I just met, we were just having a general conversation, and I... was genuinely shocked that that’s how rape - there’s [a] misunderstanding of what rape is but I also think when you talk about who is rapeable and who isn’t, there’s little dimensions to the understanding of rape” (feminist branch member, focus group, 2019). These responses show how rape is confused with sex, and that consent is blurred and deemed unimportant in the context of personal (heterosexual) relationships. This also shows that consent is sometimes thought of as a once-off deal, one that never needs revisiting. This fits into a larger pattern of hypsersexualised violence in South Africa in that rape is normalised and mystified (Bashonga and Khuzwayo, 2017).

In the section on anti-feminism, I argued that anti-feminism relies on delegitimising feminism by degrading and shaming women and feminist dissenters. This is rape culture and is supported by the violent masculinism that flourishes in the branch. The toxicity of the rape culture left women fighters, and feminists in particular, with feelings of 87.

disappointment, anger and frustration. As one feminist leader expressed herself in our interview (2018), “...the backlash that I receive informs me that this isn’t actually something that has been rooted in their minds or that they critically think about; it’s just a rhetoric of popular ideas which makes it even more difficult to speak out because they already have this response to say, no, we are immensely for women empowerment, we totally agree with you, but then their actions say something different”. The safe space that women fighters were central to constructing, through women-centred programmes and (informal) political education, is not free from masculinist violence, which persists in the branch.

Rather than having the culture of rape hinder feminism from flourishing, the rape culture directly influenced the surge in feminism that I observed and was a part of. Women were radicalised by the sexism and masculinism, as I have hinted at with the common phrase, “I didn’t come here a feminist, but these men push me”. Thus, anti-feminism and black radical feminism work against each other in a symbiotic relationship: women become conscious of sexism because of the masculinism in the branch leadership, and are then radicalised into feminist politics. However, in addition to working against each other, this antagonistic relationship between black feminists and anti-feminists is productive in the sense that the latter can radicalise women into the former. While this may not result in any substantive change of organisational culture or gender politics, black feminism unsettles the male hegemony.

The following section thus outlines the texture of the resistance offered by women against the patriarchal nature of branch politics. It is an account of their bravery and political tactics, thus centering their important gender activism. No research exists on the pioneering efforts of feminists within South Africa’s fastest growing student party (Diko, 2018), therefore the next section is of empirical importance. 88.

4.4. “I refuse to be referred to as ‘flower’ of the revolution”: Women’s agency and resistance

This section explores the major theme of how feminists use their black radical feminism to resist the sexism, masculinism and rape culture in which the branch is embedded, in light of the contentious gender relations. For me, a former leader and emotionally invested feminist of the branch, this theme is empowering because it centres the importance of women and feminists in the EFFSC, which is often invisiblised and erased from the organisation’s memory (Dlakavu, 2018) and in the media (Mathys, 2019). The findings and analysis presented here inspire me, and my hope is that this offers my feminist comrades hope in rethinking themselves and their important influence over the space.

Women and feministis resist sexist oppression in seven significant ways namely: by reclaiming their bodies and sexualities; by disrupting and reclaiming the political space; by disrupting respectability paradigms; through organising around collective trauma and for survival; by forming national and regional feminist networks; by contesting leadership positions in elective conferences; and lastly, by resigning or exiting the EFFSC.

Firstly, women are resisting against the patriarchal masculinism by reclaiming their bodies. In other words, women and feminist fighters are deconstructing how women’s bodies are treated as sites of public critique. In 2017, Naledi Chirwa, a feminist leader in the Student Command, and currently the youngest elected leader in South Africa’s parliament, launched the #ThisIsMyVagina campaign. She writes: “On that day we went in with the women and broke it down, practising black radical feminism in the spaces that we occupy, saying that males must not come was a very powerful position. The leadership of the EFF in the SRC said “this is a gathering for women, and for black women in particular,” and it was really successful. The message was basically about agency” (Chirwa in Ebrahim, 2017a).

Black radical feminism is used to politicise women’s agency, rendering it a formidable force of change. As one feminist leader at the branch higlighted, there is a sexual shame attached to the woman body, and any acts of sexuality by women and feminist fighters, 89.

whether personal or political, are seen as disrespectful and thus un-respectable. Thus, when centre their sexuality and bodies, they resist the ‘roses of the revolution’ framing: “The vagina is even given nicknames to say it’s your tanana, it’s not your vagina, it’s your cupcake… when actually it’s a body part just like anything else and you can use it as you wish to. So what she did for me was that she removed that whole myth that [in a mockingly submissive, innocent voice] the vagina is dirty, you don’t speak about it; even when you’re on your period, you can’t say. She just brought it out on the table for us to start having this conversation of listen, this is my vagina, I can do whatever I want with it and it does not belong to anyone, and it does not define in any manner the capacity I have when it comes to my organisational work... That was one of the instances, two of the instances where I really felt that there were sexist backlash to women who were actually just standing up for themselves and doing good work for the organisation. So just because I can twerk, and just because I decided to speak openly about a body part, my vagina, I am now, you know, too sexual, too radical in an organisation that is self-proclaimed militant and radical” (feminist leader, interview, 2018). This is in direct contrast with how men alleged-rapists are treated: their sexual identity is distinguished from their political identity, but with feminists, their sexuality is shamed, positioned as negative for their political identity.

Secondly, women and feminists also resist the patriarchal male hegemony by reclaiming and disrupting the physical and political space, especially using political programmes, events and informal political education on the ground. One programme at the branch in 2017, themed ‘We should all be feminists’, offered a seemingly safe space for debates about gender and society. Another was a Worker’s Day programme whereby men fighters pampered women workers from the campus, subverting the gendered notion that care work is the sole domain of women. Interestingly, the programmes I mention here all occurred during August, Women’s Month in South Africa, which I argued earlier is a mechanism with which to regulate radical feminism by reducing it to Women’s Month.

However, women and feminists also actively reclaim and disrupt male-dominated spaces in every other month of the year or when the need arises. For example, when Khensani Maseko committed suicide in 2018, the women of the branch, myself included, were 90. saddened and angered by this news, especially in the aftermath of Karabo Mokoena’s murderer’s trial, where disturbing details of sexualised violence were made public (see Chabalala, 2018). A known feminist, was asked to speak by one of the men leaders, later telling me that he asked her to keep it short, possibly a way to police her feminism. She led us in song, changing an old protest lamentation ‘senzenina’ to ‘amadoda azizinja’. There were audible murmurs of dislike and uncomfortable giggles at her choice of lyrics, but she sang loud and convicted, challenging the men who had publicly declared that ‘you cannot rape your own girlfriend’.

This feminist leader used song to reclaim power over the space so as to centre the violent masculinism with which women, students and fighters live everyday. She also actively opposed the time limits set by the male leader on how long she could hold the platform, thus disrupting the male hegemony. We also took the time to circulate a contact sheet for women in attendance to fill in, because the collective idea to establish a women-only space was started that night, at the vigil, thus centring women’s collective action within the vigil for fighter Khensani.

Thirdly, women disrupt notions of respectability which function to suppress their political identities and expressions of self. For example, “She was called a twerkist... Apparently we have to have a squeaky clean reputation and... a modest Instagram account in order to qualify to help students with issues of academic exclusion, financial difficulties and of that, you know? It’s almost as if we can’t have a personal life because we are so devoted to the organisation. You can’t have a sexual life” (feminist leader, interview, 2018).

In this quote, twerking, a popular, sexualised dance by/for women, is associated with promiscuity and an unacceptable display of women’s sexuality and sexual freedom. Chirwa was called a ‘twerkist’ by men and some women because she disrupted the mould of a respectful and respectable woman leader. I suspect that, it is not only her choice in dance moves, but also her unapologetic feminism which is being deemed disrespectful here. In turn, #ThisIsMyVagina reclaimed the woman body, arguing that the vagina, symbolic of women’s sexuality, is not a political space to be policed by systems of patriarchy, but as something that needs reclaiming and reconceptualising in both society 91.

and political spaces. Indeed, Khan (2017: 119) shows how twerking can be used as a form of defiance. Feminists were deemed unworthy of respect because they attempted to upset the limits set on being a woman fighter.

Fourthly, women are resisting the EFFSC’s masculinism by organising around their collective trauma and, as one woman highlighted in her social media posts, “organising for survival”. Following certain trends with African feminism (see Ahikire, 2014), the branch women see the oppressions that they face as sources of solidarity and collective organising, as a means of surviving the harsh economic and social gender conditions particular to black and African women. This organising is a way to escape the perpetual victimhood associated with the triple oppression faced by women namely, racism, sexism and poverty (Roth, 2003). From the social media posts, it is clear that the Black Womxn Caucus at the University of the Witwatersrand had a meaningful influence over the texture of feminism emerging at the branch that I studied.

The Black Womxn Caucus, formed at Wits University in 2017, operates under the slogan ‘Organising For Survival’, and women in the branch often donned t-shirts with the slogan and proudly posted photos on social media platforms, using captions along the lines of “organising for survival” and “black womxn in caucus”, a direct and conscious play on the name of the organisation which inspired them. In August of 2018, women from the branch, myself included, boarded a bus to Pretoria, to join thousands of women marching against the rise in femicide and gender based violence against women and girls (for a critique, see Reddy, 2018). The women and feminists of the branch are thus shaped by the larger struggle against patriarchy in South Africa, transcending the specific political context of the campus. By participating in, and actively establishing, women-only spaces within and without the branch, EFFSC women are using their collective struggles as women to disrupt power relations, and unashamedly centre gender justice.

In connection with this, women were also organising around their collective trauma. Indeed, in my experience, women fighters did come together with more intensity when there was a crisis at hand. For example, women students would come to us when they had been raped or abused by boyfriends. Also, we often shared stories of how a fighter had been raped by a known leader. Many felt enraged, frustrated and emotionally drained 92.

by this violence, and the toll of these societal issues on the mental health of feminists and women is an important area of research for the EFF. It was within this bonding that we were able to come together, find solidarity in collective suffering, and organise to disrupt the violence that has been so normalised. For example, “In the statement, womxn in the Wits EFFSC also separated themselves from patriarchs in the party and condemned male comrades who defend abusers, failing to fight masculine and patriarchal spaces. “We as womxn of this branch, separate ourselves from the patriarchs of this branch and all other patriarchs who have abused, raped, and killed womxn,” it said (Ebrahim, 2017c).

In this case, feminist fighters from the Wits branch used their collective trauma as a catalyst for holding patriarchs accountable by naming and shaming, and distancing themselves from them. This distancing disrupts the (racist) notion that EFF women are complicit in their reproduction of patriarchal violence (see Davis, 2019). Similar tactics were pursued at this branch but in unsuccessful ways, as the anti-feminism was very difficult to challenge, given the outright male dominance and the interstitiality of our marginal feminism. It also shows that women are indeed organising, both because of their collective trauma, and in order to survive those.

Fifth, EFFSC feminists are also forming regional, provincial and national social and political networks that challenge male hegemony, which I am certain is not specific to the branch that I studied. Indeed, countless empirical scholarship exists on the male centricity that characterises the public sphere, especially political parties (Andrade, 2002). One of the men fighters aptly captures in our interview (2018), “I’ve seen it many times. Let me tell you, political parties are enclaves of sexism and misogyny... These things happen most where we expect a progressive environment and that’s where you’ll see sexism”. These networks inspired closet-feminists, myself included, to become more unapologetic in, and expressive of, their gender politics.

Leading up to the third National Students Assembly (NSA) in 2019 and other branch elective conferences, these feminist networks challenged the regular lobbying practices of the EFFSC, which are usually characterised by rumour mongering, slates and private caucusing. Instead of one hegemonic group organising for a definite win, men had to 93. lobby harder to ensure the maintenance of their monopoly. As one contesting feminist pointed out in a WhatsApp post, “We were called clowns simply because we want to contest the space. People have suddenly felt the need to feel entitled to the EFFSC. This is organisation and we allowed mediocrity and drunkenness for too long”. These feminist alliances were thus a source of worry for hegemonic, anti-feminist men leaders as well as a source of rupture with an older style of doing politics.

Sixth, and linked to the fifth point, is the elective challenge that feminist organising presented to the branch. When women contested the branch’s elective conference in 2018, senior men in the organisation were deployed to the campus to quietly placate and suppress the women from challenging the male hegemony. This shows how women are at once central to the space because of the 50-50 rule, and pacifiable because their views are constructed as “politically immature”. In direct opposition, women made these backhanded dealings public on social media, visibilising how male hegemony constantly works to reconsolidate its power when it perceives a (feminist) threat. This focus on visibilisation ties in with the black radical feminism identified earlier. As one woman leader highlighted in an interview (2018): “They [powerful men] are probably scared that we might be a threat. Because now, we are there; we are in our own space together”. This implies that men are indeed fearful of the potential power that these women and feminists present collectively in challenging their monopoly, which is interesting considering that the same men also declared that women cannot possibly be their enemies because of their inherent gender inferiority.

A final and smaller, but nonetheless significant, way in which women resist the patriarchal masculinism is to exit the party. My observations in, and external to, the branch show that there is a pattern of women and feminists revoking their membership because they cannot cope with the sexism disguised as revolutionary discipline. For women leaders, such as myself, this included taking the difficult decision to resign from my post. I have witnessed social media posts about how women in other EFFSC branches leave the organisation because of the slut-shaming, rumours and general toxic masculinism of hegemonic men. This fits into how newer women fighters become the political property of men because they are perceived as “politically immature”, relative to hegemonic men. 94.

One can see here how the agency that women are exercising and building is important because of how it challenges male dominance on the one hand, and the gender neutral ideology of the EFFSC on the other hand. It does this by reclaiming space and women’s bodily autonomy, by using their collective trauma to organise for their survival as women, and by holding patriarchs accountable for their sexual violence. It is clear from this how the male dominance exists within a symbiotic relationship with women and feminists who disrupt the hegemony. Linked to this is how women are attempting to use their collective agency to reappropriate the use of the EFFSC’s 50-50 policy, which women problematise as a tool that supports, rather than challenges. patriarchal dominance over the branch.

4.5. Conclusion

In this chapter, the data was analysed using a thematic method, which revealed five main themes. Firstly, the often antagonistic gender relations between men and women fighters, grounded in a larger culture of masculinism, was shown to underpin the ways in which (anti)feminism is understood within the branch. These gender relations of antagonism are difficult to navigate because of the male dominance at the branch and because of the violent masculinism it embodies. Secondly, rape culture was a significant theme within the data, suggesting that there is indeed a pattern of sexual abuse in the EFFSC; evident in how accused rapists and abusers ascend the ranks of the party, and are not accountable for the sexualised violence that they remit on women fighters. But women and feminists are actively resisting and organising against masculinist anti-feminism. Finally, I highlighted seven major ways in which women fighters and feminists resist the sexist patriarchy, namely by contesting leadership positions, organising collectively around their collective trauma as women, and reclaiming women’s bodily autonomy and the political space in which they are embedded as activists.

Thus, it is fair to argue that despite the sexism, masculinism and gender-neutrality of the branch’s anti-feminist politics, there is a black radical feminist politic emerging from the branch, which simultaneosly resists and reshapes the form that anti-feminism takes, and expands the scope for radical feminist politics within the EFFSC’s struggle for economic freedom and free education. 95.

96.

5. CONCLUSIONS: CONFRONTING MASCULINISM, EXPANDING FEMINISM AND ‘ECONOMIC FREEDOM’

This dissertation explored how feminisms are constructed in the EFF Student Command within its twin projects for economic freedom and free education. To achieve this, I relied on observing the gender expressions and relations of a branch that I was a leader in. I supplemented the critical autoethnographic method with interviews with specific fighters, a focus group, as well as documentary data, such as policy documents and press releases. My analysis shows that feminism is a highly contested ideological contribution to the EFFSC’s Marxist Leninist Fanonian political grounding; but despite this, understandings of gender in the branch include: Marxist feminism from its formal policy and ideological grounding, anti-feminism expressed by hegemonic men leaders who hold an outright monopoly in the branch, and an emerging black radical feminism from a minority of feminist members and leaders. I argue that these feminisms are born of larger sociopolitical processes that underpin their expressions, which find their way into the fibre of the seemingly progressive political space, such as patriarchal masculinism and rape culture.

On one level, I argued that the political vacuum identified by Dlakavu (2018) in the EFF’s male-centric ideology allows for patriarchal ideologies, and modes of being reinvent themselves in this political space. This filters into leadership, increasing the potential for authoritarian and undemocratic practices, as well as into the types of programmes that are run. I found that feminist programmes are reduced to Women’s Month exercises, based on visibility and not feminist agenda, which are policed by men who hold a monopoly over the branch. Ideologically, I found that masculinist interpretations of the Marxist Leninist Fanonian political line were a further source of its hegemony over the branch, apart from the outright male dominance over the membership base.

On another level, I argued that, even though the EFFSC is a masculinist student party, emerging from this branch and others is a black radical feminism that is simultaneously a source of resistance to sexist patriarchy, as well as a critique of the limits of feminist theory and EFFSC ideology. By calling for feminism to be centred within EFFSC politics, discourse and programmes, the feminists of this branch stretch the imaginings of Marxism 97.

Leninism Fanonism to include a deeper analysis of how the current neoliberal order is gendered, not just classed and racialised. Further, by explicitly naming their branch of feminism as black radical, feminists are adding to feminist theory which has typically separated ‘black’ from ‘radical’, resulting in an unclear ‘black radical’ or ‘radical black’ feminist hodge-podge.

Changes in the campus/university political landscape can mean a change in branch politics, especially in the context of SRC elections. Male hegemony clamps down on any dissent, and in this case it is gendered. The EFFSC must think seriously about its relationship with governance: is this the free education project we are striving for? Or is the EFF better suited for oppositional politics, free to experiment with different modes of being and protesting? These questions must be answered by the respective branches through a mass democratic process, so that leaders are mandated to act for the branch, and not for themselves or the cabals they are part of. The current exclusion of women and feminist politics is clear anti-feminism, and as long as it goes unchecked, the EFF Student Command will never attain mass student party status.

Anti-feminism is largely under-researched in relation to the politics and practices of the EFF in general, and the Student Command in particular. Whereas Anderson (2015) and Blais and Dupuis-Déri (2012) locate anti-feminism within masculinism, misogyny and a perceived post-feminism, these findings suggest that, in the context of leftist student politics in South Africa, anti-feminist politics also build on Marxist, structure-centric gender expressions to argue that feminism is a non-issue in the larger struggle against racialised capitalism. This research inquiry centred the experiences and views of women and feminists, but more research is needed about the opinions of men fighters about the place of women in the EFFSC, and the broader struggle. Similarly, more research is needed on women who actively align themselves with patriarchal practice.

The anti-feminism at play in this branch represents a violent masculinism that is a reactionary response to any attempts at feminist organising outside of the male hegemony. It relies on slut-shaming, rumour mongering and desperate attempts to placate feminists who seriously threaten their hegemony; using pro-socialist language to speak away the ideas and assertions of women and feminists, to convince us that what 98.

we are doing as feminists stunts black liberation and is dangerous for mass political action, in that women are positioned as secondary to men. This is masculinism, and anti- feminism functions to defend and sustain its hegemony. This links to a larger rape culture in which the views of women and feminists can be “dealt with”; they can be convinced that the needs of the organisation are more important than their own.

These are significant findings for the EFFSC because they make visible the patterns of rape apology and sexual abuse within this branch and beyond. More research is needed to confirm if these patterns are eroding other levels of our beloved student party; my hope is that such findings would shock fighters into tackling sexism in our ranks. The pattern then continues, in that when rapists and abusers are rewarded with leadership and social capital for their performances of chauvinism, women are either radicalised into feminist politics, or they revoke their membership, exiting the organisation. If this pattern continues unabated, in this party and student politics more generally, the revolutionary potential that so many of us were drawn to in the EFFSC during FMF and beyond will continue to deplete, as the gendered toxicity exhausts women and men fighters alike.

For women in the mother body, the EFF, who Dlakavu (2018) shows are centering women in their national-level political discourse and programmes, there is an opportunity to enter the emerging EFFSC feminist networks within which this branch is located. For the ideological grounding of Marxism Leninism Fanonism, there is an opportunity to expand its discourse to include a gendered analysis on the one hand, and an intersectional praxis on the other, when black radical feminism is added to the mix. The EFF and EFFSC urgently need to formulate radical sexual harassment policies. Feminist praxes of reflexive and reflective politics will help to counter to mechanistic Marxist feminist argument that women will automatically be free from gender oppression, post-capitalism; coming together, not as hegemonic men and factionalised women, but as comrades with a collective agenda that can, and must be, rethought as we continue our struggle towards free education.

Within the organisation, there is also a need for the formalisation of political education. It must happen regularly and deliberately so as to curb the anti-feminist trend towards groundism. I am not saying that groundwork is not critical for the daily running of 99. branches, but this must be coupled with a sincere dedication to learning, debating and applying revolutionary theory in our day-to-day politics, especially since we are already situated in institutions of higher learning. The disdain for intellectual development must go if the EFFSC truly wants to position itself as a radical alternative in student politics.

In addition, a mechanism must be conceptualised and operationalised to police the manipulation of the 50-50 rule to factional ends, otherwise sexism will continue to characterise women’s experiences in the organisation. Women will also continue to be disposable gendered objects used to fill slates so as to satisfy the 50-50 rule. Also, how can the current heteronormative 50-50 rule be expanded to include prioritising queer, non- gender conforming and differently-abled students in leadership? These are complex issues that the young party must face in order to expand its current grasp of oppression and domination.

The research is autoethnographic but, without my feminist-sister-fighters, it would not have materialised, and this shows just how central we are to our collective survival in this masculinist organisation. Adebwani (2016: 277, parentheses in original) shows that through this method, “the ethnographer also becomes a (political, cultural and social) broker”. But in the context of anti-feminist masculinism, this is not the case in that gendered political subjectivities, such as myself, can be isolated from the group which is being researched. While I employed an introspective method (Denshire, 2014) to highlight larger socio political processes of gender activism in student politics, I was also researching the very organisation that was part of shaping my feminism, since it was through encountering sexism that my feminism was awakened.

The status of the knowledge generated here is thus tied to my personal experience, and thus it is easy to label me a bitter, angry feminist. But as I mentioned, others were central to its realisation. Thus, it could then be argued that the process of knowledge production was grounded in collective thought and debate. My resignation has no bearing on the arguments posed since, firstly, the data was collected during my term in office, and secondly, I was an angry feminist before my exit. The research was designed to formulate 100. debate and visibilise the political labour of feminists within the branch, as well to understand exactly what about feminism was being rejected so violently.

I found that feminism is rejected because it is seen as an unnecessary arena of thought in black emancipatory struggle, as a Western import, and as a producer of man-hating discourse. But in addition, feminism is rejected in this way because women are asserting themselves outside the space carved for them by men who dominate the branch. Violence in the form of bullying, slut-shaming and exclusion function to keep women under the authority of hegemonic men. Ironically then, it seems that anti-feminist men hate women since I have found no evidence to suggest that the branch feminists hate men.

The nature of student politics is fast-paced and fragmented, so when we prioritised more pressing issues, such as assisting students in financial and academic crisis, it was easy to feel as though we, as feminists, could have done more against the sexism and male hegemony, the toxicity of which was often subsumed into the larger workings of the branch. With this dissertation, I hoped to contribute to the gender debates that occurred in the branch, and I have done so, showing how women and feminists work against misogyny and chauvinism. We are not sitting back idly. We disrupted a vigil designed to police our mourning of a fellow fighter driven to death by her abusive partner. We called them out for their abuse and rape. We resisted their entitlement to our leadership structures by openly contesting against them. When we lost, we still carried the flag high, that red flag with the image of the strong, black fist clutching a pen.

Feminists carved their own space within the space that masculinist politics confined us to, and my advice to the women and feminists of this branch, and others, is to keep resisting and to write! Document your experiences because these writings will visibilise your strengths. This advice is not only a result of this research, but indeed my fellow feminist fighters encouraged me to write this dissertation, especially when I was too infuriated by how we were treated as dissenters. As one told me informally (2019), “you’re a black woman documenting her experiences — don’t let them stop you!”.

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7. APPENDICES

7.1. Appendix A - Semi-structured interview schedule

7.1.1. For EFFSC general (branch) members

Introductory and Biographical

- Why and when did you join the EFFSC? - What are you studying at UJ? Which year and level of study? - Does your membership to the EFFSC connect to what you are studying? - What is your involvement in the EFFSC? - What is the involvement of EFFSC in FMF? - In your own words, what is the focus / mission / political position of the EFF / SC? - What are some of the expectations you’ve had for the organisation? - Have they been met? - How / Why / Why not?

Experience of Politics and Social Relations

- Have you experienced sexism in the EFFSC? - What / How? - How did that experience make you feel towards the organisation? - Based on your experience of the branch, how do men and women comrades relate to each other - As equals? - As fundamentally different? - What do you think of the hashtag Men Are Trash? - Do you think there is trash in our branch? - How would you describe the gender relations between the sexes within the EFFSC? - What do you think of when you hear the term ‘feminism’? - Do you think that feminism, according to your understanding, has a place within: 113.

- The EFF / EFFSC? - The idea of economic freedom? - Do you think of yourself as a feminist? - What are your thoughts on the idea of an EFF Women’s Command?

Ideology Related

- Who does the ideological work of the EFFSC? - Is it mostly the mother body? - Is it mostly the ground forces? Men, women? - Is it mostly the CSCT? - In your experience, how do fighters deal with gender based violence/rape in the organisation? - Please share anything that you think you weren’t able to express / anything you’d like to add

7.1.2. For EFFSC Branch Leaders

E.g. gender officer, provincial leaders, ideologues, political education commissar

Ideology Related

- Can you explain briefly the ideology of the EFFSC? - How does gender fit in to the idea of: - Free education? - Economic freedom? - What do you understand by the term ‘feminism’? - Do you think feminism has a place within the politics of the EFF / SC?

Feminism and Gender Justice in Movements?

- Why do you think feminists have been so demonised in: - The EFF / SC? - Fees Must Fall? - What do you think of the ‘zebra organisation’ concept? 114.

- Do you think it’s enough for gender justice? - What are your general views on this?

Experiences in Politics and Social Relations

- As a leader, have you ever experienced sexism in your time at the branch? - Please tell me more about this, how you felt during and after - I’ve noticed a tension between what fighters call ‘theorists’ and ‘ground forces’ (I will explain these but this is a common debate in the branches). What do you think is the importance of this debate? What does it mean for the type of cadre developed at the EFF / SC? - Please share anything that you think you weren’t able to express / anything you’d like to add

115.

7.2. Appendix B - Focus Group Schedule Guideline

Introductions

● Aim of the focus group ● Introducing Kgomotso and her project ● Introducing Terri and her project ● Ethical issues ○ Consent forms ● Introducing ourselves to the larger group (everyone)

Historical Context ● Aware of accusations of rape within political movements historically? ● Culture of sexual violence? ● Aware of the TRC consideration of sexual violence? What effect do you think this may have had on how our government views and prioritises sexual violence. ● Explanation of transitional justice and it’s value, SA perspective, and what would have been better. ● Are we black first or women first? Frame this within the context of the argument that we need to deal with white supremacy first.

Perceptions on Feminism and Patriarchy

● What is feminism in your definition? ● Is there a simple definition? ● What is patriarchy? ● How do you define it? ● Does patriarchy find expression in your movement? ● How? Give examples ● How does your movement/organisation try to tackle patriarchy? ● Can only men be patriarchal, what about women?

Experiences in political movements/organisations

● Interactions with men comrades ● Women in leadership - experiences and challenges ● Sexual violence and rape within our movements 116.

● Are these reported? ● How are they dealt with internally? ● Support for survivors?

Gender based violence in political organisations/movements

● Issues of consent ● Can you be raped by your partner? ● How do we define a women? ● Issue of equality

Sisterhood and women’s solidarity

● ‘Taking our bras off’ together - creating the space ● Because male sexism pushes us away from men, we become feminists/we are ● radicalised

Solutions and a way forward

● Should we meet regularly? ● Nzinga women’s group? 117.

7.3. Appendix C - Interview Information and Consent Form

Information for Participation in Interview Research The following is a consent for a research project on the EFF Student Command, being conducted through the University of Johannesburg, carried out by Terri Maggott, a member in good standing of the EFFSC branch of UJ APK. I will read through this form with you carefully, and will answer any questions the interviewee may have. Before the interview can start, the interviewee and I should sign two copies of this form. The interviewee will be given one copy of the signed form. The purpose of this research is to help our organisation, the EFFSC, gain a deeper understandinding of its feminist ideologies and gender practices, so that our movement can think seriously about issues related to gender. This research, and your participation in it, will assist in building the EFFSC to the radical element it hopes to be. As fighters, we should think critically about Deputy President Shivambu’s argument that oppression against women is oppression against all (Shivambu, 2014: 98). Your participation in this research, as a fighter, is therefore of great importance in building our organisation and reaching consensus about the type of party we wish to be part of and active in.

Consent from Participant in Interview Research I, ______, volunteer to participate in this research project conducted by fighter Terri Maggott from the University of Johannesburg. I understand that the research project is designed to gather information about the EFF Student Command. I will be one of approximately 20 people being interviewed for this research. 1. My participation in this project is voluntary. I understand that I will not be paid for my participation. I may withdraw and discontinue participation at any time without penalty. If I decline or withdraw from the interview, no one on my campus will be told. 2. I understand that most interviewees will find the discussion interesting. If, however, I feel uncomfortable in any way during the interview, I have the right to decline to answer any question, and/or end the interview. 3. The interview will last approximately 30 - 45 minutes. Notes will be written by Terri during the interview. An audiotape of the interview and subsequent dialogue will be made. If I do not want to be taped, I will make this known, and instead, notes will be taken. 4. I understand that the researcher will not identify me by name in any reports using information obtained from this interview, and that my confidentiality as a participant in this study will remain secure. Subsequent uses of records and data will be subject to standard data use policies which protect the anonymity of individuals, organisations and institutions. 5. Faculty and administrators from my campus will neither be present at the interview, nor have any access to raw notes or transcripts. This precaution will prevent my individual comments from having any negative repercussions. 118.

6. I have read and understood the explanation provided to me. I have had all my questions answered to my satisfaction, and I voluntarily agree to participate in this study. 7. I have been given a copy of this consent form.

______My signature

______My Printed Name

______Signature of the Investigator

______Printed Name of the Investigator

For further information, please feel free to contact: Terri Maggott at [email protected]

119.

7.4. Appendix D - Focus Group Information and Consent Form

Informed Consent — Women Student Activist Views on Feminism and Rape Culture Within Political Movements

Principal Investigators: Terri Maggott and Kgomotso Mokoena

Purpose This study investigates the views of women student activists on feminism and rape culture within political movement. As part of this study, you will be asked to participate in a focus and answer structures and open-ended questions. This will take approximately 120 minutes.

Participants’ Rights ● Responses will be kept in the strictest of confidence and will be available only to the researchers. ● If you so wish, no one will be able to identify you when the results are reported and your name will not appear anywhere in the written report. ● Please do not share other people’s identities or responses from the focus group with others to maintain the anonymity of the participants outside of the focus group. ● You may skip any questions or tasks that you do not wish to answer. ● The consent form will be kept separate from the data records to ensure confidentiality. ● You may choose not to participate or withdraw at any time during the focus group without penalty. ● You agree to have your verbal responses tape-recorded and transcribed for further analysis with the understanding that your response need not be linked to you personally in any way. After the transcription is completed, the tape recordings will be destroyed.

I understand that I am participating in a study of my own free will.

Consent to Participate I acknowledge that I am at least eighteen years old, and that I understand my rights as a participant, as outlined above. I acknowledge that my participation is fully voluntary.

Please choose one response appropriate to you: ⬜ I am comfortable with my identity being revealed ⬜ I would rather remain anonymous

Print Name: ______120.

Signature: ______Date: ______