"Passing women": gender and hybridity in the fiction of three female South African authors

• Main Author: Marais, Marcia Helena
• Other Authors: Lewis, Desiree
• Language: en
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Passing; Gender; Coloured identity; Fiction; Representation; Hybridity; Race; Discourse; Miscegenation; Stereotype
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11394/3696

A key aim of this study is to shed light on the representation of coloured women with reference to racial passing, using fictive characters depicted in Sarah Gertrude Millin’s (1924) God’s Stepchildren,Zoë Wicomb’s (2006) Playing in the Light, and Pat Stamatélos’s (2005) Kroes, as presented by these three racially distinct female South African authors.Since I propose that literature provides a link between a subjective history and the under-represented narratives from the margins, I use literature to reimagine these. I analyse the ways in which the authors present ‘hybrid’ identities within their characters in different ways, and provide an explanation and contextual basis for the exploration of the theme of ‘passing for and as white’ within South Africa’s complex history. I provide a sociological explanation of the act of racial passing in South Africa with reference to the United States by incorporating Nella Larsen’s (1929) Passing. Since the analyses will concentrate on coloured females within the texts, gendered identity and female sexuality and stereotypes will be the focus. I look at the act and agent of passing, the role of raced and gendered performance in giving meaning to social identities, and the way in which the female body is constructed in racial terms in order to confer identity. Tracing the historical origins of coloured identity and coloured female identity, I interrogate this colonial, post-colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid history by employing a feminist lens. A combination of postcolonial feminist discourse analysis, sociological inquiry and feminist narrative analysis are therefore the methods I use to achieve my research aims. === Magister Artium - MA