Social Memory and American Cosmopolitan Sexuality in South African Policy and Practice
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Transcript of Social Memory and American Cosmopolitan Sexuality in South African Policy and Practice
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1 Thomas-Williams
Social Memory and American CosmopolitanSexuality in South African Policy and Practice
This paper examines the Cosmopolitan woman, who represents the fun, fearless,
female brand womanhood. This is a case study developed from a larger project that
examines Cosmo issues from several regions in its global readership. The imagined
Cosmo woman of South Africaproduced by the largest globalized womens magazine
publisher and communications corporationis symbolic of a transnationally mass
produced ideal of womanhood whose sexual behaviors and racialized subjectivities are
mediated through popular culture.
The standard tagline on :Cosmopolitan is the lifestylist for millions of fun, fearless females whowant to be the best they can be in every area of their lives. Cosmopolitaninspires with information on relationships and romance, the best in fashionand beauty, the latest on womens health and well-being, as well as whatis happening in pop culture and entertainmentand just about everythingelse fun, fearless females want to know.
Since the early 1970s Cosmopolitan Magazine has been extending its empire to the far
reaches of the earth picking up developing economies along the way; Cosmopolitan
enjoys a monthly readership in excess of 10 million people in 100 countries and 36
languages. Hearst Magazines International could be romanticized as an American
success story if the magazines global success did not reflect the insidious reality of
empire buildingcorporate mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and monopolyresulting
in the globalization of a distinct class of womanhood.
In the time we have today, I want to connect the representation of globalized
womanhood in the process of democratic and capitalistic nation building to the
development of a (post)feminist female subjectivity, and I want to explore what the this
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means for rebuilding a national narrative or social memory in the South African
democracy.1
Cosmos International Subjectivity
The U.S. Cosmo woman is upheld to certain beauty standards that follow a rigid
white hyper-hetero(sexual) middle class upwardly mobile metropolitan womanhood.
What is interesting and useful about identity, despite that it has been highly critiqued by
postmodern scholars as an empty category, is that it provides an interpretive framework
for cultural practices that help people make sense of social conduct and expressive
culture. Hyper (hetero)sexuality,
2
is the primary way in each of the international Cosmo
women are constructed. The Cosmo woman is particularly located in her role as a
feminine gender and this generic form of womanhood is always attached to normative
Fun, Fearless, Female, bodies, which is the catch phrase for the international brand
Cosmopolitan.3 The fun expressed by the Cosmo brand female is attained through
the pursuit and manipulation of heterosexuality, desire, and consumption.
Cosmo South Africa
South Africa is a unique case study due to its recent 1994 inauguration as the
first democratic government in South African history.4 The Union of South Africa was
initially established in 1910, [and] its political, economic, and cultural metropole was
Great Britain (130). South Africa now can be considered to be in a post-colonial stage,
with one of the most egalitarian constitutions of any democracy today; however, as
1the free and equal right of every person to participate in a system of government, often practiced by
electing representatives of the people by the majority of the people.2
Sexuality is meant to indicate sexual desire and the partner choices of people in sexual relationships.3
Fun, Fearless, Female is used to promote the magazine globally; Hearst Corporate Site, 2007.Accessed at the world wide web on April 13, 2007 at: http://www.hearstcorp.com/4
Cheryl McEwan, Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies,(Volume 29, Number 3, September2003):742.
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Grant Farred and many other scholars note, looking beyond race (and I argue gender)
is an impossibility: race racism, (and gender and sexism) are not only dialectical but
epistemologically foundational to what South Africa is today. 5 Inderpal Grewal adds
that globalized relationships between nations is part and parcel to the process of the
development of a national imaginary or collective social memory of the people of a
region/nation/state.6 The first two black presidents, Mandela and Mbeki, had the task of
rescuing what they termed, according to Farred, the foundational element of society,
which he claims is race, and re-scripting it into an incorporative commonality of national
identity through rhetoric.
7
Enter the Cosmo fun, fearless, female, an imaginary
woman schooled in helping along the image of burgeoning democracieslike America
once was, and like South Africa is today.
Cosmopolitan is intimately bound up in the national narrative, or social memory,
of the great American Dream. George Hearsts earliest fortunes came from mining and
politics and with his son William Randolph Hearsts 1887 foray into magazine
publishing, Cosmopolitan magazine helped to build the Hearst Corporations global
media empire. Cosmopolitan magazine entered into the national conscience as one of
the first mass produced magazines delivering the latest news, fiction, and
advertisements to privileged Americans helping to script the collective memories about
what it meant to be a good white married, or soon to be, Cosmo reader. As I stated
before, Cosmo now buys in at the ground level of developing capitalistic marketplaces,
5Grant Farred, Shooting the White Girl First: Race in Post-apartheid South Africa. In Clarke, Kamari
Maxine and Deborah Thomas (Eds). Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Productionof Blackness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); 227-8.6
Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, (Durham: Duke University
Press):11.7Ibid.
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helping to script a new national narrative, or social memory, about what it means to be a
woman.
In herJournal of Southern African Studies article, Cheryl McEwan argues that
building the official post-colonial archives of South Africa is an effort that must include
black women, not only to locate black women in the shared memory of the traumatic
events of the past, but also to allow women the access to the process of healing; Bantu
oral traditions, colonialism, and apartheid, has historically prevented black women from
being included in any dominant accounts of history.8 In fact, McEwen reports that
four tons of highly incriminating records governmental documents were destroyed in
South Africa fourteen years ago during the transition to democracy.9 Material artifacts
of the collective national memory are important, because as McEwen argues memory
represents more than individual experience and stands for a collective social and
economic experience, particularly as it relates to class.10 Building inclusive material
memories resists amnesia about a traumatic past and promotes a shared sense of
national and communal belonging, which leads to healing.
The Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women in South Africa, an official
document of the African National Congress reveals the lasting effects of the triple
oppression of South African women: triple oppression is characterized by the
restrictive and repressive experiences of South African black women under apartheid
law because of their race, class, and gender.11 In fact, the legacy of apartheid still
8McEwan, 740.
9Ibid., 742
10Ibid., 747
11The Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women in South Africa is excerpted from a paper by the
Secretariat for the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, in Copenhagen, July1980. Available June 16, 2008 on the World Wide Web:http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/women/effects.html
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Spain are the only two countries in the world that allow legal gender identitychange without surgery. Transsexual subjects of South Africa, who, the featurereports, are characterized by a majority of black and Indian people of the region,describe the pleasures and dangers of an enlarged clitoris and an enjoyment ofsexualitya full sexual citizenship. American transsexuals are required to obtain
sex change surgery to become legal citizens of the opposite sex, which canreduce sexual nerve endings causing some loss of feeling in the genitals, thuseffectively denying Americans full sexual citizenship.
Overall, Cosmo South Africa is writing a very liberal national narrative to aid the sharedthe social memory of the state, but lets review those features once more with a criticaleye:
y The December 07 issue that explores black rage frames it as a disorder treatablewith anti-depressant medication.
y The March 2008 features about how to identify sexual harassment in theworkplace (carries with it its own set of assumptions about the Cosmo readers
place in the economyand amnesia about being locked out of cities duringapartheid.), and the about HIV positive twins were U.S. citizens.
y Jessica Albas answer to her experiences at the hand of racism and sexism is toget tough, and learn how to physically defend herself.
y Although the May 2008 issue covered important issues in the lives of transmen,and despite the fact that the article reveals that the majority of the SA populationare people of color, Jay McNeil and Lee Gale, the fun fearless men are whitemen from UK.
Further research revealed that
y Because Cosmo South Africa is an English language magazine (only0.5% of people in SA speak English)
y 6 of the last 8 cover stars were white or light skinned women.y Femininity is expressed through heterosexuality.
y Content is driven by American celebrity.
y The content is more than 45% -50% advertising. Advertisements forAmerican or Brittish products with very little representations of blackwomen or men.
Colonizing Femininities
There is a disjunctive between the imagined fun, fearless, femalethe Cosmo
brand womanand the fact that black women in Africa suffer from triple oppression.
Cosmo South Africa should be read as an example of colonizing Western forms of
feminisms that that Mohanty identifies in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Mohanty argues homogenous representations of women
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of color effaces individual womens experiences in favor of a globalized or universal
womanhood, which perpetuates a First World versus Third World relationship
between the U.S. and women of color. While the gendered rhetoric in Cosmo cannot be
attached to a particular feminist, but a female, Cosmo co-opts rhetoric emerging from
the Westernized feminist movement elevating Western feminism above the Third
World woman and her cultural practices.12 This cooptation of the language of the
feminist movement is an act which scholars, such as Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra,
label as post-feminism. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra in their edited collection
Interrogating Postfeminism:
Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture argue that
Postfeminist culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize
aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via
the figure of woman as empowered consumer. . . . It is also a strategy by
which other kinds of social difference are glossed over.13
This incorporation of messages about empowered female subjects, women who are not
feminists, into popular culture creates a form of silent visibility, which then posits
certain forms of feminism as extreme, difficult, and unpleasurable.14 Tasker and
Negras argue that silent visibility is characterized by using women essentially as
pinups, enduring lynchpin[s] of commercial beauty culture, which then carries with it an
erasure of feminist politics.15 The imagined woman represented on the pages of
12Mohanty, 6-7, 235, 258.
13Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism:Gender and the Politics of Popular
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): 2.
14Ibid., 4.
15Tasker and Negra, 3.
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Cosmo South Africa thus enjoys a postfeminist sexual citizenship16 that is not
commensurable to the experiences of women living in South Africa. AND in a
postfeminist world, this could be construed as the fallout of a failed feminist movement.
Tasker and Negra argue that post-feminism, which is white and middle class by
default, assumes that women now live in a pastness of feminism where postfeminist
culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism through
consumption as a strategy . . . for the production of the self.17 Through the discursive
and actual production and deployment of patriarchal power, Cosmo positions sexually
free black African women as the face of the new democratic nation-state. These
forms of colonizing femininities thus differ from the whiteness subsumed in post
feminism. Using gender as form of development rhetoric, like Cosmo South Africa
does, is a form of colonizing femininities in which the Cosmo editors purposefully
circumscribe the behavior of African women by promoting traditional American family
values, through partnerships to promote sexual health.18 Even the transmen in the
May 2008 issue were in long term heterosexual partnerships. In the case of South
Africa, Cosmo is a colonialist effort that capitalizes on the work of the feminist arm of the
civil rights movement covertly promoting white American supremacist hegemonic
norms. Gendering women in Africa through Americanized Cosmopolitan sexuality is
16
Sexual citizenship here is meant to point to the ambiguous slippery nature of sex. Sex as a conceptbiologically adheres to bodies creating the dimorphic categories of male, female, man, woman. Thesesexed bodies are at once entered into a system that also genders bodies according to sociallyconstructed norms. Sexual citizenship is based upon the sexual practices of these normative sexed andgendered bodies.17
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism:Gender and the Politics of PopularCulture, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); 1-2.
18 Stacy Leigh Pigg and Vincanne Adams (Eds). Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global
Perspective, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 13.
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discursive violence, a form of colonizing femininities, strategically executed by the
most powerful nation against Africa.
I will leave you with but one critical questions for the archive:
y What does it mean to be a fun, fearless, female in a nation-state where 380,000rape cases are reported in South Africa every year? The majority of the victimsare black children below the age of 15 and forty per cent of these are youngchildren including toddlers. (African National Congress)
y Remember what Patricia Hill Collins said, that to be fearless is to have nothing tolose.
y This is a scary revelation.