Diversity Exchange, Issue 15, March 2011

Date: March 4, 2011

Diversity Exchange

Issue 15 | March 2011

Contents

Editor’s Note

by Saeanna Chingamuka
It seems 2011 has kicked off with some drama in the journalism profession, as well as action-packed protests in North Africa that have seen the end of several political careers. We have celebrated the power of the people and the power of social media. Those who are good at creating jokes have also given us something to laugh about: “lesson learnt from the recent protests: never build a square at the centre of the capital city.”
In my editorial note last month I wrote at length about the power of social media and how women can harness it to advocate for gender equality. However, I’m in a catch-22 situation now as to whether this is possible following a recent incident in Egypt involving Lara Logan, a renowned South-African born journalist practising in the US. Read more…


		GMDC News

GMPS and GIME in-country launches

Gender Links (GL) has started taking the findings of the Gender In Media Education (GIME) audit and the Gender and Media Progress Study (GMPS) to the countries. This past month there were launches in Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar and Malawi. This has provided stakeholders an opportunity to engage with and discuss the findings of the two studies. Read more…

Steady progress on the adoption of gender codes in the region

This month GL has intensified its efforts to ensure that media regulators in the region finalise and adopt their gender code of ethics. There have been positive developments on this front with the Press Council of Botswana (PCB), which adopted its gender code on 1 February. This followed a half day meeting between the PCB membership and GL in Gaborone. The gender code has been in draft form since 2007. Now that the code has been adopted there is need to move towards making it operational to ensure that the SADC Protocol media targets are met. Read more…

Newsroom gender policy roll-out gains momentum

Gender Links is slowly but surely edging closer to its target of 100 newsroom gender policies by June 2011. This is in line with the requirements of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development which calls on the media to create enabling environments for the achievement of gender equality by 2015. Read more…

Reporting elections in SADC

With only four years to go before the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development’s 2015 target of equal representation of women and men in decision-making positions, Gender Links (GL) is intensifying its capacity-building efforts. The GL gender, media and elections project seeks to raise awareness of civil society and media on the gendered dimensions of the electoral processes in Southern Africa. Read more…

Malawi dancing towards dictatorship again

“Bingu Okays newspaper ban law” screamed newspaper headlines a day after the Republic of Malawi’s president signed a repressive media law. To me this was not only shocking but an intimidation and a threat to my journalism profession. I grieve also because the law just came into power a month after I had completed my journalism degree. What a cold welcome I received into the industry. However, fear grips me that someday I could be a cause of a newspaper closure. Read more…

Inside the tragedy of African bigotry

Uganda has been at the epicentre of vitriolic hate campaigns against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) communities. An anti-homosexuality bill, currently before the Ugandan Parliament, has been roundly condemned across the world. A number of newspapers in the country have published inflammatory and hateful material, including an article in the extremist newspaper, The Rolling Stone, which carried the inflammatory headline “Hang them, they are after our kids” along with photographs of members of Ugandan LGBTI organisations. Read more…


		Partner News

GL takes media literacy course to National University of Lesotho

Twenty-two first year students from the National University of Lesotho’s media department participated in the gender and media literacy course from 7 to 25 February. The course was held at the Institute of Extra-Mural Studies (IEMS), which hosts the media department. Read more…

MISA-Zimbabwe launches second journalist in residence

Last month MISA-Zimbabwe launched the second phase of its Journalist-in-Residence programme with veteran journalist Grace Mutandwa delivering a journalism lecture at the National University of Science and Technology’s Department of Journalism and Media studies in Bulawayo. The lecture focused on the past and present structures of media in Zimbabwe and how this impacted freedom of expression dating back to the 1980s. Read more…


		GL Opinion & Commentaries

International: What we can learn from Lara Logan

The sexual assault and battery to which South African broadcast journalist Lara Logan was recently subjected in Egypt, and the response by sections of the international media to her horrific ordeal, brings home the fact that much remains to be done in the area of gender-media activism. Read more…

CSW 2011: Ordinary women not part of the discussion

For millions of women across the globe whose lived realities are lives of abject deprivation and the struggle for dignity, the Commission on the Status of Women is not about the excitement of New York or even about this year’s particular theme: Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women. It is about asking governments (and donor agencies that fund them) to make their lives better. Read more…

CSW 2011: Our education systems are failing women

What happens when educational institutions fail to educate our next generation about the importance of health, sex and human rights? Read more…


		Seminars

International Women’s Day – 8 March

On 8 March 2011 we will mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). The 2011 United Nations (UN) theme for IWD is “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women”. Gender Links’ theme is “Decent work, Decent lives: 100 years of herstory”. Read more…


		Upcoming Events

10 March: Launch of GMPS/GIME Swaziland in Swaziland

16 March: Media literacy for Mass Media Council and media houses at Hotel Cardoso, Maputo: 08h30-16h30

17 March: Launch of GMPS/GIME Mozambique at Hotel Cardoso, Maputo: 18h00-20h30

TBD: Media literacy for School of Journalism and Media Studies at University of Dar es Salaam

TBD: Media literacy for radio station staff and students at Malawi Institute of Journalism


		GMDC Databases

Clippings

Lifting the barbed veil

For a moment, it seemed that Egypt wasnââ‚¬â„¢t just throwing off its political shackles. Women, long suffering from the scourge of sexual harassment, reported that Cairoââ‚¬â„¢s Tahrir Square, command central of the uprising, had become a safe zone free of the groping and leering common in their country. Now the reported attack on a senior US TV correspondent during the final night of the 18-day revolt has shown that the threat of violence against women in Egypt remains real. CBS has said its chief foreign correspondent, Lara Logan, went through a ââ‚¬Å“brutal and sustained sexual assault and beatingââ‚¬ by a frenzied mob in the square during Fridayââ‚¬â„¢s celebrations after Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Read more…

Female journos ‘more at risk’

This week the sexual assault of a South African journalist in Cairo sent shock waves through the media world. But it also raised the issue of the risks that journalists, especially women, face in the field. On 17 February CBS reporter Lara Logan, who hails from Durban, was assaulted by a group of men while she was covering a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Although the details of the assault are unclear, it has been confirmed that she had to spend a few days in hospital upon returning to her family, who are based in the United States. Although journalists have always been in a dangerous profession – with 44 recorded deaths among journalists in the field in 2010 – Logan’s attack has brought to light the issue of attacks on female journalists, something that is rarely given much attention. Read more…

The haves and the have-nots

The story of farm workers and their employers is a shocking tale of the haves and the have-nots. While their bosses drive around in expensive 4×4 vehicles and are within the top echelons of society, farm workers continue to live in squalor. Some farm workers have spent most of their lives working, yet they do not have anything to show for it. But farm workers play an important role in feeding the nation through their efforts on the farms. Zhendara Ruwizhi (63) of Lilfordia Estates outside Harare said he has been a farm worker for more than 20 years, but life has not changed. Read more…

Research

Women trading in food across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border: experiences and strategies

This article focuses on Zimbabwean women who are responding to economic problems at home by trading food in South Africa. It explores crops the women market, the strategies they use to access these markets, the challenges they face in South Africa, and the way they handle and resolve conflicts of various kinds which arise in the course of their activities. Ensuring household survival by engaging in international trade presents women with the challenge of conquering gender stereotypes, and this potentially enhances their independence. Read more…

A critical analysis of the oppositional discourses of the ideal female body in women’s conversations

Socialisation agents such as the popular media and same age female peers construct and reproduce notions of what is physically ideal, feminine and beautiful in a woman (Hesse-Biber 1996). My interest lies in how a group of young women reproduce, contest and possibly transform such notions in conversations with their same age female friends. The study aims to answer the following question: What ideologies are reflected and perpetuated in the discourses associated with the ideal female body? Since notions of what is ideal and beautiful are indeterminate and in perpetual flux, I focus in particular on areas of contradiction and contestation in the body talk conversations. As such, the analysis examines three extracts in which the young women draw on oppositional discourses to construct notions of female beauty. I believe that these extracts represent discursive struggles in relation to the dominant Western ideal of the slim, toned female body, an ideal which more closely resembles a newly pubescent girl’s body than the curvaceous, shapely body of an adult woman (Bartky 2003; Grogan 1998). Read more…

A hermeneutics of sexual identity: A challenge to conservative religious discourse

In this thesis the researcher explores the use of the bible as a normative text with regard to sexuality (especially homosexuality). It begins with a focus on the Genesis creation myth (Genesis chapters one and two), using Robert Gagnonââ‚¬â„¢s gender complementarily argument against homosexuality. It is then argued that essential to understanding how to interpret the creation myth, a person can use a theory developed by Martin Noth, called Deuteronomistic History. This theory helps us to understand that the scriptures (particularly the books from Deuteronomy through to II Kings) were compiled by a group of Jewish priestly redactors (employing retrospective theology) to form part of a continuous narrative that can be said to include the book of Genesis. As such, using the Gadamerian concepts of finitude and effective history, they assert that the creation myth is historically situated, and thus cannot be uncritically applied to contemporary issues, such as homosexuality. Nevertheless it played a central role against the background of a politics of survival in the formation of a Jewish national and sexual identity. Read more…

Case Studies

Normalising gender violence?

In November 2010, a 15 year old girl at Jules High School allegedly accused her school mates for raping her at the play ground after consuming alcohol. The story made headlines in different South African stories and different newspapers shaped their own agenda around this case. As the story unfolded, readers were told that the girl had consented to the sexual act; that the girl had consumed alcohol within the school premises with the alleged rapists and she was then charged for engaging in sexual acts as a minor. Furthermore, her school mates cursed her and said that she had given the school a bad reputation. In this case, the mediaââ‚¬â„¢s role in reporting can be questioned as it ran a parallel trial judging the girl and shaping the ultimate sentence. The mediation prompted questions about the role of the media in ending gender violence. Read more…

Female school drop-outs go back to school

Forced marriages and early pregnancies continue to impinge on access to education of the girl child in Malawi and in the region. The SADC Gender Protocol 2010 Barometer shows that there is wide gap in proportion of males and females in the educational sector, especially in secondary and tertiary levels. More girls continue to drop-out of school due to early marriage and rising HIV and AIDS prevalence, among other reasons. Nevertheless, local civil society organisations, media and government are trying to close the gap through raising awareness on the importance of education and lobbying governments to put in place policies that promote access to education by girls and boys. This case study provides an analysis of a story, run by Zodiak Malawi, on an initiative in that country aimed at encouraging female school drop-outs to go back to school. Read more…

Sexist remarks at female match official

Richard Keys and Andy Gray of Sky Sports are products of modern television’s habit of recasting broadcasters as “personalities”, celebrities, players in the great drama on field and screen. With this power, often, comes an arrogance and an inability to size up the world outside the studio. Read more…

Publications

2010 FIFA WOrld Cup: Gender, Politics and Sport

The euphoria of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa seems to persist, albeit as faded, scraggy remnants of flags hanging precariously on aerials and the side view mirrors of cars. The cacophony around this event has died. Shakira has left the stage. However the debate about the gendered impact of the FIFA World Cup still remains. This special issue of Agenda, maps out some of the key features of the debate, as we question whether womenââ‚¬â„¢s perception in sport has been significant and whether international sporting events can make a substantive difference in womenââ‚¬â„¢s lives. The joy, elation and fervour of the movement seemed to be epitomised in the effervescent, omnipresent buzz of the vuvuzela. It seemed that, for a moment, the FIFA World Cup has helped us realise ââ‚¬Å“A better life for allââ‚¬ . But did the 2010 FIFA World Cup realise the promise of development for all in a substantive way? And can we look to these mega celebrations of masculine prowess in international sports in future, to impel economics and social development, and recognise the rights of the most vulnerable sectors of our population? This issue questions the gender impact of the FIFA World Cup and its benefits and consequences for marginalised sectors of South African women. We ask what difference the 2010 World Cup event has made in the lives of women sex workers, informal women street vendors and for raising the profile of womenââ‚¬â„¢s sport. We use the FIFA World Cup as the organising trope, to reflect critically on a number of gendered developmental issues in South Africa. Read more…

Gender and Media Progress Study: Southern Africa

In 2009/2010, Gender Links, the Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA) Network and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) undertook the Gender and Media Progress Study (GMPS) covering over 30 000 news items in 14 countries. Building on the Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS) of 2003; the HIV and AIDS and Gender Study of 2006 and the Francophone study of 2007 that combined these two studies, the GMPS covered four key areas. These are: general media practise; Gender and the Media; HIV and AIDS as well as Gender Violence. The full report can be accessed from: https://www.genderlinks.org.za/page/gender-and-media-progress-study Read more…

The Security Sector in Southern Africa

This monograph is a study of the security sector in six Southern African countries, namely Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It highlights the strengths and challenges of the various institutions that make up the security sector, including defence, police, prison, intelligence, private security, oversight bodies and the policy and legal frameworks under which they operate. The monograph represents an attempt to provide baseline data on the security institutions in the region so that we can better determine where security sector reform measures are needed. Read more…


		Internships				Members

Internships

I continue to dig for my diamond: success

Violet Hunadi Ralebipi is the new 2011 Communications Intern at Gender Links. She is a South African citizen born on 8 May 1989 in a township called Praktiseer, Limpopo. Prior to her internship at Gender Links, Ralebipi completed a Communication Studies degree at University of Limpopo, majoring in Communication Studies, Media and English. She stood out and received awards for top student in English (2009 and 2010) and third position in Media Studies (2009 and 2010). Read more…

Members

University of Limpopo

The University of Limpopo recently signed an MOU with the GMDC. We would like to welcome the university into the GMDC family. They have already started enjoying the fruits of the MOU: one of their students (above) is currently with GL on a six-month internship. Read more…

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Diversity Exchange, Issue 15, March 2011

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