'Looking back and moving forward': Gender, culture and constructions of transition in South Africa

This article explores how the concept of culture is mobilised to produce and represent women in relation to different temporalities ('then' and 'now') within the nation project, and the particular constructions of 'transition' that emerge in and through such processes. Drawing on black women's life narratives and theoretical resources at the interface of feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial knowledge, it explores how discourses of 'origin' and 'independence'/'freedom' inscribe the notion of culture in ways that not only galvanise the meaning of 'the past' and the 'new' South African nation, but in so doing position women in particular ways. This article highlights women's ambivalences regarding this positioning and posits that whether women adopt, adapt or challenge the discursive constructions of 'culture', they invariably reveal the centrality of the dominant patriarchal continuity of gender violence that continues to define their subjectivities and shape their experiences.