‘BEING ROMANTIC’, AGENCY AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION AND (RE)NEGOTIATION OF TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES Nicola Human November, 2018 University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 1 Declaration This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the graduate Programme of Psychology, School of Applied Human Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. I, Nicola Human, declare as follows: 1. The data and arguments presented in this thesis – except where otherwise indicated – represents my original work. This research does not contain data in the form of pictures, graphs, or other information from someone else’s work or from the Internet, unless specifically indicated and referenced. This research does not contain the writing of someone else, unless specifically acknowledged as such. (a) Where someone else’s ideas have been used, they have been rewritten in my own words and attributed to them. (b) When someone else’s words have been used exactly, these have been referenced according to the American Psychological Association guidelines. 2. Two UKZN Psychology Honours research projects were conducted as off-shoots to this study in 2014. Both studies were co-supervised by myself and my supervisor Dr Michael Quayle and were submitted in October, 2014. (a) In the first study, my data from Couples 1, 2 and 5 were analysed by Yamiska Naidoo (student number: 211517798) and Nondumiso Qwabe (student number, 211502797) for their project, titled “A qualitative investigation of how South African men and women produce romantic masculinity, and its relationship to hegemonic masculinity”. Written permission was acquired from the participants and an independent application to the Ethics Panel was approved for the students to use this data. In their Appendices, they included my original documentation as support, including my ethical clearance (Appendix 1B) and amended ethical clearance (Appendix 1C); advertisement (Appendix 2); consent form (Appendix 4); and 2 Interview questions (Appendices 7A-E). They used the pseudonyms I had created to refer to the participants; but their interpretation and analysis of this data was their own and was independently conducted to this study. (b) A second Honours project, conducted by Kelsey Coady (student number 211502445) and Claire du Toit (student number 211527721) was also conducted in 2014, and titled “Norms that extinguish and enhance romance: A quantitative study in South Africa on the societal expectations about the way we get ready to go on a date, and how these are gendered”. It was independent to my study and generated its own unique data and analysis. However, it did use as a starting point the list of activities appearing in my checklist tables (Appendices 7B and 7E). Therefore, the work described in this thesis has not been submitted to UKZN or other tertiary institution for purposes of obtaining an academic qualification, whether by myself or any other party. Signed ______________________ Date___11 March 2019_______ As the candidate’s Supervisor I agree to the submission of this thesis. Signed ______________________ Date___11 March 2019_______ 3 Dedications and acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Research Foundation in the form of an Innovation Doctoral Scholarship, grant number 83778, received from 2013-2015. Additional support was provided in 2013, 2014 and 2018, from the NRF grant TTK2008051600002. To my supervisor, Dr Mike Quayle – you have inspired me, encouraged me, and always been so kind, patient and knowledgeable. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your effort in getting me across the finish line. I am more grateful than words can express. To the UKZN Social Psychology Laboratory and to Kevin Durrheim, thank you so much for listening to my ideas and providing me with helpful feedback and healthy cynicism about what could be ‘wrong’ with romance. I particularly extend my gratitude to Philippa Kerr and Tamaryn Nicholson, who embarked on this journey with me. To Clare Chester and my colleagues at work, thank you for the support and interest and for cheering me on. Thank you also to my friends and our families for the encouragement, and the myriad small ways you have loved, helped and supported us. To my darling Strauss and Oliver, for the sacrifices, endless support and for believing in me. And to Charlie, our unborn bean, I hope the stress of finalising the PhD has not done you too much irreparable damage. Finally, to the participants, I extend my gratitude and appreciation for your openness and honesty. I’ve tried to stay as true to your stories as I can while still being critically reflexive about the system in which we are all of us placed. But this is not to say I am critical of you or your relationships. The love and respect you have for each other was so inspiring, and Strauss and I were both privileged to be a part of your lives for a short time. We learnt so much as a couple from you all, and from the extraordinary love, care, and consideration you show for each other. Dedicated to the memory of our darling Alana, who provided help and humour at key moments and will be sorely missed. 4 Abstract Romance is a ubiquitous, Western cultural context which is constructed as an important tool for relationship success. However, research by gender scholars on romance as a site for gender enactment has been limited. Therefore, this study investigated the way that romance and romantic gendered identities may be produced or resisted, and investigated how ‘being romantic’ may produce affordances for particular gendered identities and limit others. This study took an ethnographic discursive approach and five middleclass, heterosexual South African couples were recruited to take part. Each participant was asked to plan a ‘romantic event’ for their partner and was interviewed multiple times in different contexts. A total of 25 interviews were conducted over eight months in 2013. The transcribed interviews were analysed using a discursive approach to investigate how romance, masculinity and femininity were constructed and performed. The study’s theoretical model viewed the romantic context as providing a range of situated affordances and discursive scripts for identity production, and explored how romantic masculinity and femininity were co-constructed as different but complementary gender identities. The findings suggested that romance was differentiated according to time, effort, and flexibility in deviating from the discursive scripts that govern it. Three forms of romance emerged, and the more rigid the discursive boundaries, the more romantic it was produced as being and thus as offering the best access to emotional intimacy. This emotional intimacy was positioned as being central to relationship maintenance, especially within the context of marriage. It was found that romantic masculinity was characterised by chivalry and the active orchestration of romance. In contrast, participants struggled to operationalise romantic femininity, especially in ways that allowed for active romancing of the man. Some romantic feminine agency was presented in resistance to this gendered norm, but appeared to need more justificatory work and more effort in its execution in comparison to that of the men participants. 5 By studying the co-production of masculinity and femininity as a product of the romantic context, a key finding has emerged. It has been argued elsewhere that women are responsible for the emotional housekeeping of their relationships, and this was evident in the data as well. However, this analysis argues that the narrow, rigid scope of the situational discursive scripts of grand dates limit the ways that women can take the initiative to enact them in meaningful ways. Thus, our modern understanding of romance places women in a dilemmatical position: they are expected to do relationship- maintenance, but the greater comparative effort and the stigmatising effect on both the active romantic woman and her partner means that women must rely on men to produce it. While it is possible to re-imagine romance, until we can collectively reduce this normative pressure, we will be strong-armed into re-enacting romance in ways that support patriarchal, old-fashioned gender identities. Keywords: romance, masculinity, femininity, gender hegemony, patriarchy, situated affordances, discursive scripts 6 Contents Page ‘BEING ROMANTIC’, AGENCY AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION AND (RE)NEGOTIATION OF TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Declaration ..................................................................................................................................................... 2 Dedications and acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4 Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................... 5 Contents Page ................................................................................................................................................ 7 List of Figures and Tables ............................................................................................................................. 11 List of Extracts .............................................................................................................................................