Abstract: In this introduction and framing to this special issue on "Narratives of everyday resistance from the margins", we make the case that narrative method and practice can contribute to a radical scholarship of psychosocial praxis. Critical scholarship is after all the mainstay of the PINS (Psychology in society) tradition since its inception in 1983 (Anonymous, 2014). To continue with this tradition of this critical theorisation, we reflect on themes contained in the five papers that constitute this issue and beyond, especially in relation to how these themes also link with similar global issues. We argue for conceiving of the collection of stories as agential narratives which contribute to a decolonial scholarship by centring lives positioned on the margins of post-apartheid South Africa. The stories told here recognise that the capitalist, racist and patriarchal orders which create abjection and poverty reside alongside lives permeated by joy and the search for meaning. The hallmark of the stories is a narrative of resistance and the refusal to accept inequality and injustice. We posit that the narrative frame is humanising and enables scholars to centre the everyday as a site for illuminating "wretched making" and the different ways of saying no.
Abstract: Narrative methodologies emphasise the temporal quality of both lived lives and told stories, and enable us to attend to the ways in which the grand narratives of history and socio-political life articulate with individual, personal lives or psychological realities. However, the narrative approach entails three key epistemological and/or political problems: 1) the imposition of a particular conception of a "good" narrative (and by implication, psyche or life) that entails logical flow, integration and coherence; 2) the production and re-inscription of a gap between life and story, particularly stories told in research interviews; and 3) individualising single narrators extracted from their contexts. I argue that combining narrative research methods with visual methodologies within an action research paradigm may assist us to work through and against these limitations. Visual methodologies are relatively commonplace as a means to collect data, particularly helpful when stories are difficult to articulate. I suggest extending the use of visual techniques to facilitate creative representation and productive analysis. Examples of innovative visual representations of data illustrate possibilities for challenging the limits above: 1) Repetitive stress injuries: Non-stories and visual techniques for sense-making; 2) Visual tracking of multiple temporal trajectories; and 3) Re-invoking the relational quality of narrated identity.
Abstract: Using Gayatri Spivak's famous question about whether the "subaltern" can speak, this article addresses the testimonies given to the Fariam Commission of Inquiry by the widows of miners who had been killed in police shootings while engaged in an unprotected strike at Lonmin's platinum mine at Marikana in August 2012. The widows were required to face down the dominant narrative disseminated by mine management and other business as well as state interests, which held that the police had acted in self-defence after the strikers had threatened to attack them. I argue that the widows consciously sought to undo the dominant narrative through their testimonies, assuming the role of a new kind of "political widow" as theorised by Mamphela Ramphele (1996). The article begins with a detailed consideration of the testimony of Sepati Mlangeni whose husband had been murdered by an agent of the apartheid state, delivered to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s. This sets the scene for the questions that might be asked and the observations made of the Marikana widows' testimonies presented to the Fariam Commission almost twenty years later.
Abstract: This paper details the life stories of young black men, specifically how they negotiate their masculine identities over time. The researcher tracked a group of young black men over a period of nine years, from when they were adolescent boys (between the ages of 13 and 18 years), until they were young adults (between the ages of 23 to 26 years at the time of the writing). The aim of the study was to explore how the participants spoke about their relationships with their fathers as young adolescent boys and how they were now fathers to their own children as young men. At the beginning of the study the participants were given disposable cameras and asked to take 27photos (the total available on the film) under the theme, "My life as a young black man in the new South Africa". The photos undertaken were used to facilitate semi-structured interviews in which the life stories ofwhatitmeantto be a young black man were shared. Between four to fourteen follow-up interviews were conducted with some of the participants. Key themes in the life stories included relationships with mothers, experiences of growing up without fathers, entering the world of work, and being fathers themselves which encouraged them to also reflect about their own relationships with their fathers. It is clear from their experiences that narratives of being a young black man are not static, but continuously change depending on the context, and time. In conclusion, it is argued that these positive voices of masculinities need to be promoted and celebrated.
Abstract: To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.
Abstract: To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.
Abstract: To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.
Abstract: To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.
Abstract: To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.
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