Daniel J Conway | University of Westminster (original) (raw)

Books by Daniel J Conway

Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa, 2014

This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in... more This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in South Africa, twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office. Drawing on over sixty in depth biographical interviews and ethnographic work in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, Daniel Conway and Pauline Leonard analyse how British immigrants' relate to, participate in and embody South Africa's complex racial and political history. Through their everyday lives, political and social attitudes, relationships with the places and spaces of South Africa, as well as their expectations of the future, the complexities of their transnational, raced and classed identities and senses of belonging are revealed. Migration, Space and Transnational Identities makes an important contribution to sociological, geographical, political and anthropological debates on transnational migration, whiteness, Britishness and lifestyle, tourism and labour migration.

Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa, 2012

Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the gendered dynamics of... more Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the
gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa’s militarisation, analysing
the defiance of compulsory military service by individual white men and the
anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription
Campaign (ECC). The ECC was the most significant white anti-apartheid
social movement in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are
conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities.

Analysing the interconnections between militarisation, sexuality, race,
homophobia and political authoritarianism, Conway draws upon a range of
materials and disciplines to produce this socio-political study. Sources include
interviews with white men who objected to military service in the South African
Defence Force (SADF), archival material including military intelligence surveillance of the ECC, ECC campaigning material, press reports and pro-state propaganda.The analysis is informed by perspectives in sociology, international relations, history and from analysis of contemporary militarised societies such as Israel and Turkey.

Papers by Daniel J Conway

Sexualities, 2024

This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the 'Two-Thirds World', drawing from ethno... more This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the 'Two-Thirds World', drawing from ethnographic data, focussing on under-researched contexts and analysing common and divergent themes in queer critiques of Pride globally. Criticisms of corporate involvement and capitalist appropriation of Pride are replicated in the case studies; there is also a complex politics of necessity, precarity, and pragmatism. 'Mainstream' Prides reflect and can exacerbate racial and class divisions and be a well-rewarded career path for its organisers. The article analyses the radical politics of 'alternative' queer Prides and argues for the importance of continually tracing the ideological impacts of Pride, engaging with the dynamics of global capitalism, and highlighting the struggles of queer grassroots activists.

Routledge, 2022

This chapter considers activism both as a set of practices and an identity. It critiques the cont... more This chapter considers activism both as a set of practices and an identity. It critiques the contentious politics framing of activism for being too narrowly focused on protest and for treating activists as rational actors. The chapter argues that feminist and queer concepts of activism open up spaces to consider activism and activists in complex and multiple ways, engaging with cultural, affective, and transformational activist praxes. Conceptualising being an activist as a proclaimed and acknowledged identity poses questions for where the boundaries of this identity exist, what forms activism takes place in the ‘everyday’ and how activist identity can change over time and context. Drawing from case studies that intersect with race and racism, the chapter then considers the changing spaces for activism, including the web, and the challenges for researchers when engaging with regressive activism.

International Feminist Journal of Politics , 2022

This article focuses on the articulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) ide... more This article focuses on the articulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) identities, lives, and rights at Pride events in Hong Kong. I argue that analyzing Pride as a Foucauldian "regime of truth" reveals how it is embedded in and reproduces broader ideological effects and structures of global capitalism. Focusing specifically on the corporate Out Leadership Asia Summit and Hong Kong Migrants Pride, organized by migrant domestic worker (MDW) unions and LGBTQ+ activists, the article explores transnational discourses of "global homocapitalism" that frame LGBTQ+ identities in individual and economically productive terms. By contrast, Migrants Pride highlights the exploitation of work and the precarity of MDWs and forges intersectional alliances with the feminist social justice movement. These differing conceptions of LGBTQ+ lives and needs form a contested "politics of truth" that exposes the tense and incongruous relationships between local and global, neo-liberal and collective, and rich and poor that underpin the dynamics of privilege and marginality of LGBTQ+ subjects in Hong Kong. The article argues that Pride's co-option is an uneven and shifting process across global contexts. Migrants Pride, by enacting queer resistance to discourses of "corporate Pride," offers a case study of how Pride can be a platform for social justice activism.

Sociology, 2022

In response to criticisms of whiteness and the privileging of middle-class South African experien... more In response to criticisms of whiteness and the privileging of middle-class South African experiences over the black majority and those in poverty, Johannesburg Pride expanded from a one-day event to include a 'Lifestyle Conference' in 2018. This article argues that rather than including broader South African LGBTQ+ experiences, rights and needs, the conference centred privileged and normative 'lifestyles' and emphasised individual agency, rather than making intersectional inequalities visible and a basis for collective action. Drawing from ethnographic research at Pride events, and interviews with Pride organisers and LGBTQ+ activists, this article builds on critiques and insights from social theory to analyse Johannesburg Pride's Lifestyle Conference; its aims, politics, marketing and messages. By exploring the raced and classed exclusions of Johannesburg Pride, this article addresses key gaps in the academic literature on Pride, and traces how the lifestylisation of LGBTQ+ identities obscures inequality and contributes to the neoliberal cooption of Pride.

Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, 2008

Asking the man question in a society where compulsory all-male military conscription is standard ... more Asking the man question in a society where compulsory all-male military conscription is standard inevitably requires interrogating how masculinities are militarized and how militaries are masculinized. A militarized state devotes considerable cultural, legal and discursive resources to perpetuating the militarization of masculinities. Men who feel anxious about serving, who consider it a waste of time or see it as an abuse of state power, are likely made to feel they are unreasonable, "unmanly" and subversive. Exploring the impact of this gender dissidence allows an analysis of Cynthia Enloe's insight that "if a state's military begins to lose legitimacy, the tension between masculinity and military service can become acute" (1993:54). In 1980s apartheid South Africa, two years of full-time compulsory conscription existed for all white men and this was followed by a fifteen-year period of alternate-year "camp duty". Tensions between masculinity and military service emerged when a small number of white men publicly rejected compulsory conscription. They were then joined by white men and women who established a war resistance and anti-apartheid movement called the End Conscription Campaign (ECC). Objection to military service for expressly political reasons reflected deeper cultural shifts and widening divisions in South Africa's white community (Phillips 2002:224; Charney 1987) and demonstrated how the contradictory pressures of militarization on a society can provoke projound political change. The analysis of the war resistance movement in South Africa reveals the possibilities and constraints for contesting and destabilizing dominant militarized gender norms and contesting racist and authoritarian rule. The use of sexist and homophobic discourses to stigmatize objectors and their supporters demonstrated the heteronormativity of the public realm, and the dilemma of how to transgress such stigmatization confronts peace activists across contexts. The case study of war resistance in apartheid South Africa and the cultures of masculinity that underpinned it resonate with social practices in contemporary militarized societies such as in Israel and Turkey. This chapter will begin by theoretically conceptualizing conscription and political objection to it as "performative" (Butler 1999) acts generative of individual and collective identity. I will move on to analyse the discursive and material means by which the apartheid state militarized masculinity; and finally I will conceptualize and assess resistance to conscription in South Africa.

British Migration: Privilege, Diversity and Vulnerability, 2018

Ethnicities, 2010

This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has mov... more This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has moved from the margins and has become an accepted focus for study in Critical Race Studies. We argue that current scholarship is developing the paradigm empirically and theoretically, and does so without need to justify its approach. This special issue incorporates a number of national and transnational contexts, is located in a number of disciplines and theoretical approaches, and develops the intersections between whiteness and gender, queer studies, migration, nationalism and militarization.

Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique, Jan 1, 2017

This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and ... more This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and commemorating white activism against apartheid, specifically war resistance in 1980s South Africa. As such, the chapter analyses the politics of complicity in activism by privileged subjects, the obscuring and exposing of complicity in the commemoration of previous activism and the role of academic research in upholding and threatening ongoing ‘ignorance’ about such complicity. In a reflexive account of researching and analysing the social and political activism of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), a white led anti-apartheid movement and specifically the responses to published work and analysis of the ECC, I argue that the ECC challenged many fundamental aspects of militarised apartheid governance, but my analysis of the movement also traced the compromises and contradictions of the ECC and the gendered political messages it posed. As white South Africans, activists were also caught in debates about complicity and privilege in racial, economic and gendered terms. Furthermore, when researching in the 2000s, I became aware that former activists and conscientious objectors were keen to obscure former divisions in the movement and emphasise their agency and heroism in opposing apartheid, narratives that fed into broader political discourses premised on white citizenship claims in contemporary South Africa. The chapter explores the outraged responses to analyses by some former ECC activists, resistance to the study and questioning of whiteness as a salient category of research and an attempt by the (white led) parliamentary opposition (the Democratic Alliance) to rehabilitate white liberal agency in ending apartheid and discrediting the ANC government. This white 'backlash' politics is also contextualised as emergent from the responses to the #RHODESMUSTFALL and # FEESMUSTFALL movements. The chapter also relates this to the increased focus on supposed white suffering during apartheid (of conscripts and other soldiers) and the decentring of injustice suffered by the black population. I argue that that these are socio-political narratives premised on ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2000) and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007 ; Steyn 2012): a politics of obscuring and complicit with ongoing white privilege.

South Africa’s latest round of municipal elections ostensibly marks a watershed in the country’s ... more South Africa’s latest round of municipal elections ostensibly marks a watershed in the country’s democratic development. The dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has at last been seriously challenged, and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) looks better placed than ever to mount a real electoral threat in the next presidential election in 2019.
The ANC has once again captured more than 50% of the vote, but it has nonetheless lost control of key urban areas, including Nelson Mandela Bay; at the time of writing, it was fighting to stay ahead in Tshwane (Pretoria) and Johannesburg.
This is certainly an important change, and an expression of anger and disappointment about Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president – but do they really break the mould of South Africa’s race-based post-liberation politics

The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World, Jul 28, 2016

Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-politics of dress translat... more Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-politics of dress translated into the macro-politics of power. Thatcher’s changing career can be traced through her dress (see Young 1991: 416-417); analysis of her dress leading up to and during her Premiership reveals both her aspirations and increasing power. Understanding of Thatcher’s agency in her embodied, dressed performances can be informed and developed through Butler’s (1999) conceptualization of performativity. Through adaptation, repetition and divergent dress, Thatcher constructed different identities, some of which became iconic symbols of her self and her politics. Examination of Thatcher’s dress refines the understanding of the relationship between constraints and agency experienced by actors in the public realm. Upon becoming party leader, Margaret Thatcher’s gender, class and ideological viewpoints were incongruent with her unprecedented political status and she faced many challenges in attempting to overcome this. Dress became a potentially destabilising focus for her critics and symbolic of her “outsider” status. Yet in the face of these challenges she recognized and learned from the expectations of others, adapting and changing her dress. However, this was not an instantaneous, complete or permanent transformation. What Thatcher achieved, as she crafted her dressed performances, was agency over a further aspect of her life and her politics. There was also an evolving alignment of her dress with her political ideology and domestic and international roles over time.

Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, 2014

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform... more External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of
white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had
the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and
Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in
crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate
objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the
white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, “feminine” weakness,
cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as “strangers” in the public realm,
were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fi... more This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a 'pro-gay rights' candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to 'vote gay' in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-agrave-vis the status quo.

This article reflexively analyses the construction of identity and the representation of the past... more This article reflexively analyses the construction of identity and the representation of the past in qualitative interviews with white men who refused to serve in the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF). The contribution that white male objectors made to the anti-apartheid struggle occupies an ambivalent and increasingly forgotten aspect of South African liberation history. In a reflexive research story, I argue that the gendered, sexual and raced subjectivities of the researcher and researched are central to the joint construction of meaning in the interview and in the creation of self-narratives. The article also analyses how the narratives of white men's involvement in resisting apartheid are defined by their perceived position and wider power struggles in contemporary South Africa.

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform ... more External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, "feminine" weakness, cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as "strangers" in the public realm, were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population ... more Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population and marginalizing white opponents of apartheid. As such, homophobia was a recurrent feature of political and legal discourse. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) opposed compulsory conscription for all white men in the apartheid era South African Defence Force (SADF). Its challenge was a potentially radical and profoundly destabilizing one and it articulated a competing definition of citizenship to that offered by the state. The pro- and anti-conscription discourse was inherently gendered and overtly sexualized. The South African government regularly associated men who objected to military service with effeminacy, cowardice and sexual 'deviance'. The case of Dr Ivan Toms' objection, a gay objector who wished to cite his sexuality as a primary motivation for his objection, reveals the unwillingness of the ECC to engage in sexual politics. Using Shane Phelan's and Zygmunt Bauman's concept of friends, enemies and strangers, this paper investigates the construction of both white gay men and white people who opposed apartheid as 'strangers' and suggests that the deployment of homophobia by the state was a stigmatizing discourse aimed at purging the ECC's political message from the public realm. In this context the ECC adopted an assimilatory discursive strategy, whereby they attempted to be 'respectable whites', negotiating over shared republican territory. This populist strategy, arguably safer in the short term, avoided issues of sexuality and the fundamental conflation of sexuality and citizenship in apartheid South Africa. The ECC thus circumscribed its radical and deconstructive political potential and did not offer a 'radical democratic' message in opposition to apartheid.

Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa, 2014

This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in... more This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in South Africa, twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office. Drawing on over sixty in depth biographical interviews and ethnographic work in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, Daniel Conway and Pauline Leonard analyse how British immigrants' relate to, participate in and embody South Africa's complex racial and political history. Through their everyday lives, political and social attitudes, relationships with the places and spaces of South Africa, as well as their expectations of the future, the complexities of their transnational, raced and classed identities and senses of belonging are revealed. Migration, Space and Transnational Identities makes an important contribution to sociological, geographical, political and anthropological debates on transnational migration, whiteness, Britishness and lifestyle, tourism and labour migration.

Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa, 2012

Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the gendered dynamics of... more Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the
gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa’s militarisation, analysing
the defiance of compulsory military service by individual white men and the
anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription
Campaign (ECC). The ECC was the most significant white anti-apartheid
social movement in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are
conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities.

Analysing the interconnections between militarisation, sexuality, race,
homophobia and political authoritarianism, Conway draws upon a range of
materials and disciplines to produce this socio-political study. Sources include
interviews with white men who objected to military service in the South African
Defence Force (SADF), archival material including military intelligence surveillance of the ECC, ECC campaigning material, press reports and pro-state propaganda.The analysis is informed by perspectives in sociology, international relations, history and from analysis of contemporary militarised societies such as Israel and Turkey.

Sexualities, 2024

This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the 'Two-Thirds World', drawing from ethno... more This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the 'Two-Thirds World', drawing from ethnographic data, focussing on under-researched contexts and analysing common and divergent themes in queer critiques of Pride globally. Criticisms of corporate involvement and capitalist appropriation of Pride are replicated in the case studies; there is also a complex politics of necessity, precarity, and pragmatism. 'Mainstream' Prides reflect and can exacerbate racial and class divisions and be a well-rewarded career path for its organisers. The article analyses the radical politics of 'alternative' queer Prides and argues for the importance of continually tracing the ideological impacts of Pride, engaging with the dynamics of global capitalism, and highlighting the struggles of queer grassroots activists.

Routledge, 2022

This chapter considers activism both as a set of practices and an identity. It critiques the cont... more This chapter considers activism both as a set of practices and an identity. It critiques the contentious politics framing of activism for being too narrowly focused on protest and for treating activists as rational actors. The chapter argues that feminist and queer concepts of activism open up spaces to consider activism and activists in complex and multiple ways, engaging with cultural, affective, and transformational activist praxes. Conceptualising being an activist as a proclaimed and acknowledged identity poses questions for where the boundaries of this identity exist, what forms activism takes place in the ‘everyday’ and how activist identity can change over time and context. Drawing from case studies that intersect with race and racism, the chapter then considers the changing spaces for activism, including the web, and the challenges for researchers when engaging with regressive activism.

International Feminist Journal of Politics , 2022

This article focuses on the articulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) ide... more This article focuses on the articulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) identities, lives, and rights at Pride events in Hong Kong. I argue that analyzing Pride as a Foucauldian "regime of truth" reveals how it is embedded in and reproduces broader ideological effects and structures of global capitalism. Focusing specifically on the corporate Out Leadership Asia Summit and Hong Kong Migrants Pride, organized by migrant domestic worker (MDW) unions and LGBTQ+ activists, the article explores transnational discourses of "global homocapitalism" that frame LGBTQ+ identities in individual and economically productive terms. By contrast, Migrants Pride highlights the exploitation of work and the precarity of MDWs and forges intersectional alliances with the feminist social justice movement. These differing conceptions of LGBTQ+ lives and needs form a contested "politics of truth" that exposes the tense and incongruous relationships between local and global, neo-liberal and collective, and rich and poor that underpin the dynamics of privilege and marginality of LGBTQ+ subjects in Hong Kong. The article argues that Pride's co-option is an uneven and shifting process across global contexts. Migrants Pride, by enacting queer resistance to discourses of "corporate Pride," offers a case study of how Pride can be a platform for social justice activism.

Sociology, 2022

In response to criticisms of whiteness and the privileging of middle-class South African experien... more In response to criticisms of whiteness and the privileging of middle-class South African experiences over the black majority and those in poverty, Johannesburg Pride expanded from a one-day event to include a 'Lifestyle Conference' in 2018. This article argues that rather than including broader South African LGBTQ+ experiences, rights and needs, the conference centred privileged and normative 'lifestyles' and emphasised individual agency, rather than making intersectional inequalities visible and a basis for collective action. Drawing from ethnographic research at Pride events, and interviews with Pride organisers and LGBTQ+ activists, this article builds on critiques and insights from social theory to analyse Johannesburg Pride's Lifestyle Conference; its aims, politics, marketing and messages. By exploring the raced and classed exclusions of Johannesburg Pride, this article addresses key gaps in the academic literature on Pride, and traces how the lifestylisation of LGBTQ+ identities obscures inequality and contributes to the neoliberal cooption of Pride.

Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, 2008

Asking the man question in a society where compulsory all-male military conscription is standard ... more Asking the man question in a society where compulsory all-male military conscription is standard inevitably requires interrogating how masculinities are militarized and how militaries are masculinized. A militarized state devotes considerable cultural, legal and discursive resources to perpetuating the militarization of masculinities. Men who feel anxious about serving, who consider it a waste of time or see it as an abuse of state power, are likely made to feel they are unreasonable, "unmanly" and subversive. Exploring the impact of this gender dissidence allows an analysis of Cynthia Enloe's insight that "if a state's military begins to lose legitimacy, the tension between masculinity and military service can become acute" (1993:54). In 1980s apartheid South Africa, two years of full-time compulsory conscription existed for all white men and this was followed by a fifteen-year period of alternate-year "camp duty". Tensions between masculinity and military service emerged when a small number of white men publicly rejected compulsory conscription. They were then joined by white men and women who established a war resistance and anti-apartheid movement called the End Conscription Campaign (ECC). Objection to military service for expressly political reasons reflected deeper cultural shifts and widening divisions in South Africa's white community (Phillips 2002:224; Charney 1987) and demonstrated how the contradictory pressures of militarization on a society can provoke projound political change. The analysis of the war resistance movement in South Africa reveals the possibilities and constraints for contesting and destabilizing dominant militarized gender norms and contesting racist and authoritarian rule. The use of sexist and homophobic discourses to stigmatize objectors and their supporters demonstrated the heteronormativity of the public realm, and the dilemma of how to transgress such stigmatization confronts peace activists across contexts. The case study of war resistance in apartheid South Africa and the cultures of masculinity that underpinned it resonate with social practices in contemporary militarized societies such as in Israel and Turkey. This chapter will begin by theoretically conceptualizing conscription and political objection to it as "performative" (Butler 1999) acts generative of individual and collective identity. I will move on to analyse the discursive and material means by which the apartheid state militarized masculinity; and finally I will conceptualize and assess resistance to conscription in South Africa.

British Migration: Privilege, Diversity and Vulnerability, 2018

Ethnicities, 2010

This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has mov... more This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has moved from the margins and has become an accepted focus for study in Critical Race Studies. We argue that current scholarship is developing the paradigm empirically and theoretically, and does so without need to justify its approach. This special issue incorporates a number of national and transnational contexts, is located in a number of disciplines and theoretical approaches, and develops the intersections between whiteness and gender, queer studies, migration, nationalism and militarization.

Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique, Jan 1, 2017

This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and ... more This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and commemorating white activism against apartheid, specifically war resistance in 1980s South Africa. As such, the chapter analyses the politics of complicity in activism by privileged subjects, the obscuring and exposing of complicity in the commemoration of previous activism and the role of academic research in upholding and threatening ongoing ‘ignorance’ about such complicity. In a reflexive account of researching and analysing the social and political activism of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), a white led anti-apartheid movement and specifically the responses to published work and analysis of the ECC, I argue that the ECC challenged many fundamental aspects of militarised apartheid governance, but my analysis of the movement also traced the compromises and contradictions of the ECC and the gendered political messages it posed. As white South Africans, activists were also caught in debates about complicity and privilege in racial, economic and gendered terms. Furthermore, when researching in the 2000s, I became aware that former activists and conscientious objectors were keen to obscure former divisions in the movement and emphasise their agency and heroism in opposing apartheid, narratives that fed into broader political discourses premised on white citizenship claims in contemporary South Africa. The chapter explores the outraged responses to analyses by some former ECC activists, resistance to the study and questioning of whiteness as a salient category of research and an attempt by the (white led) parliamentary opposition (the Democratic Alliance) to rehabilitate white liberal agency in ending apartheid and discrediting the ANC government. This white 'backlash' politics is also contextualised as emergent from the responses to the #RHODESMUSTFALL and # FEESMUSTFALL movements. The chapter also relates this to the increased focus on supposed white suffering during apartheid (of conscripts and other soldiers) and the decentring of injustice suffered by the black population. I argue that that these are socio-political narratives premised on ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2000) and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007 ; Steyn 2012): a politics of obscuring and complicit with ongoing white privilege.

South Africa’s latest round of municipal elections ostensibly marks a watershed in the country’s ... more South Africa’s latest round of municipal elections ostensibly marks a watershed in the country’s democratic development. The dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has at last been seriously challenged, and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) looks better placed than ever to mount a real electoral threat in the next presidential election in 2019.
The ANC has once again captured more than 50% of the vote, but it has nonetheless lost control of key urban areas, including Nelson Mandela Bay; at the time of writing, it was fighting to stay ahead in Tshwane (Pretoria) and Johannesburg.
This is certainly an important change, and an expression of anger and disappointment about Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president – but do they really break the mould of South Africa’s race-based post-liberation politics

The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World, Jul 28, 2016

Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-politics of dress translat... more Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-politics of dress translated into the macro-politics of power. Thatcher’s changing career can be traced through her dress (see Young 1991: 416-417); analysis of her dress leading up to and during her Premiership reveals both her aspirations and increasing power. Understanding of Thatcher’s agency in her embodied, dressed performances can be informed and developed through Butler’s (1999) conceptualization of performativity. Through adaptation, repetition and divergent dress, Thatcher constructed different identities, some of which became iconic symbols of her self and her politics. Examination of Thatcher’s dress refines the understanding of the relationship between constraints and agency experienced by actors in the public realm. Upon becoming party leader, Margaret Thatcher’s gender, class and ideological viewpoints were incongruent with her unprecedented political status and she faced many challenges in attempting to overcome this. Dress became a potentially destabilising focus for her critics and symbolic of her “outsider” status. Yet in the face of these challenges she recognized and learned from the expectations of others, adapting and changing her dress. However, this was not an instantaneous, complete or permanent transformation. What Thatcher achieved, as she crafted her dressed performances, was agency over a further aspect of her life and her politics. There was also an evolving alignment of her dress with her political ideology and domestic and international roles over time.

Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, 2014

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform... more External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of
white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had
the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and
Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in
crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate
objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the
white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, “feminine” weakness,
cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as “strangers” in the public realm,
were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fi... more This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a 'pro-gay rights' candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to 'vote gay' in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-agrave-vis the status quo.

This article reflexively analyses the construction of identity and the representation of the past... more This article reflexively analyses the construction of identity and the representation of the past in qualitative interviews with white men who refused to serve in the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF). The contribution that white male objectors made to the anti-apartheid struggle occupies an ambivalent and increasingly forgotten aspect of South African liberation history. In a reflexive research story, I argue that the gendered, sexual and raced subjectivities of the researcher and researched are central to the joint construction of meaning in the interview and in the creation of self-narratives. The article also analyses how the narratives of white men's involvement in resisting apartheid are defined by their perceived position and wider power struggles in contemporary South Africa.

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform ... more External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, "feminine" weakness, cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as "strangers" in the public realm, were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population ... more Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population and marginalizing white opponents of apartheid. As such, homophobia was a recurrent feature of political and legal discourse. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) opposed compulsory conscription for all white men in the apartheid era South African Defence Force (SADF). Its challenge was a potentially radical and profoundly destabilizing one and it articulated a competing definition of citizenship to that offered by the state. The pro- and anti-conscription discourse was inherently gendered and overtly sexualized. The South African government regularly associated men who objected to military service with effeminacy, cowardice and sexual 'deviance'. The case of Dr Ivan Toms' objection, a gay objector who wished to cite his sexuality as a primary motivation for his objection, reveals the unwillingness of the ECC to engage in sexual politics. Using Shane Phelan's and Zygmunt Bauman's concept of friends, enemies and strangers, this paper investigates the construction of both white gay men and white people who opposed apartheid as 'strangers' and suggests that the deployment of homophobia by the state was a stigmatizing discourse aimed at purging the ECC's political message from the public realm. In this context the ECC adopted an assimilatory discursive strategy, whereby they attempted to be 'respectable whites', negotiating over shared republican territory. This populist strategy, arguably safer in the short term, avoided issues of sexuality and the fundamental conflation of sexuality and citizenship in apartheid South Africa. The ECC thus circumscribed its radical and deconstructive political potential and did not offer a 'radical democratic' message in opposition to apartheid.