Dislodging the hegemony of the white epistemological frame

Abstract

In South African public discourse, the concept of gender appears to be cognate with the category of woman. Given the presence of masculinity studies in South Africa, the normative view of gender does include both men and women, but in the South African public discourse, gender is still largely cognate with woman. Accordingly, I am interested in this conceptual disconnect between gender and men, specifically within the Black community. Although this disconnect is attributed to the distribution of opportunities and the prevalence of gender-based violence, both said to largely disadvantage women, I contend that this disconnect is possible because of liberalism’s concealment of anti-Black racism, producing epistemic blindness. In other words, the juridical incorporation of Black people into liberalism not only masked the reality of their ontological domination, it imposed a narrow epistemic trajectory over the concept of ‘gender’. As such, while anti-Black racism is considered non-hegemonic, the gender struggle assumed the fundamental contradiction of the liberal democratic order. However, the gendering of Black people in the 1994 dispensation has a differential impact between Black men and Black women, enabling the latter to capitalise on the concealment of anti-Black racism while the former are crippled by the colonial legacy of Blackness.