Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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kARIN VAN MARLE
the feminine as being consumed to the fore and aptly challenges the
myth of consumption as empowerment.
In the second section, Women’s lives: Agency, stories and testimony,
four interdisciplinary arguments put forward the need for greater
attention to the specificity of women’s lives, their choices concerning
reproduction, mobility and the need for listening to women’s stories
and testimony. The authors in this section combine theory with
empirical and archival research. In ‘Agency amidst adversity: poverty
and women’s reproductive lives’ Kammila Naidoo scrutinises the
assumption that smaller families are the results of upward economic
and social mobility. Relying on empirical work undertaken in the
community of Winterveld, she shows how smaller families should
rather be seen as a way of resisting poverty. She argues powerfully for
more gender sensitive accounts of changes in reproductive dynamics.
Christo Venter, Mac Mashiri, and Denise Buiten in ‘Engendering
mobility: towards improved gender analysis in the transport sector’
echo Naidoo’s call for more gender sensitive research. The authors
expose the link between women’s work and their access to work. In
‘Domestic violence and victim offender conferencing in South Africa’,
Jean Triegaardt and Mike Batley investigate the possibilities of
restorative justice as a response to domestic violence on the basis of
empirical research. Staying with the theme of sexual violence, Lize
Kriel in ‘Tini’s testimony’ tells the story of Tini and the German
missionary who sexually abused her. Kriel’s historical investigation is
a nuanced re-telling of the events that illustrates the complexities of
the intersection of gender, race and class politics, and issues that still
haunt us today.
The (im)possibilities of becoming
Much time and much space have been taken up by debates and
discussions on the theme of essentialism, not only in feminist and
gender discourse, but in philosophical and political discourse in
general. The authors of this volume skilfully manage to put forward
strong arguments and challenges to traditional approaches to sex and
gender without repeating by now stale debates around essentialism.
The title of this volume reflects, instead of any fixed definition, a call
for ‘continuous becoming’. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reliance
on Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing could be seen as
a significant backdrop for these engagements. 19 Claire Colebrook and
Ian Buchanan discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between
a molar and molecular politics and their argument that the former
19 Buchanan, C and Colebrook, I Deleuze and feminist theory (2000) 2; Deleuze G
and Guattari F A thousand plateaus: Capitalsim and schizophrenia (1987) 277.
See also Deleuze Negotiations 1972-1990 (1995).