Maid to serve: ‘Self-fashioning’ and the domestic worker trope in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

This article investigates how the domestic worker sartorial trope is reflected and embodied in contemporary South African culture. Domestic work has received very little public or media attention from feminists, trade unionists, or even political activists broadly until the recent movement of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This article observes how the South African political party, the EFF, use the domestic worker dress as a subversionary tactic in sociopolitical culture. By appropriating the archetypal domestic worker dress, the EFF demonstrate both identification with the domestic worker and a subversion of what the domestic worker dress has, for so long, inferred. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the author examines the domestic worker trope and the significance of dress. This article uses critical discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to explicate both the personal and political significance of the domestic worker dress in contemporary South Africa.

Black Neofascism? The Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa

“…This understanding of the EFF exists mainly in academic and popular media analyses . Such analysis challenges the fascist list of characteristics to delineate the EFF more as populist but modern racial nationalist, emphasizing performative aspects of the EFF (Mahali ), including costume, and its “institutional renaissance” role in parliament through its boisterous challenges to the Zuma‐led ANC since 2014 (Calland and Seedat :328). The left populist analysis is grounded in a perspective that the EFF represents a “left break” from the ruling ANC‐led alliance by being grounded in an ideological commitment to Marxism‐Leninism‐Fanonism, commitments to nationalization and expropriation without compensation, and galvanizing of disaffected postapartheid youth (ostensibly a mobilization consistent with international trends and unprecedented in the postapartheid period) (Nieftagodien :446–449).…”

“…For Goldfrank (, ), like many sociologists such as Mann () and Paxton (), true fascism involves a movement that emerges among the nonelites and then contends for power and allies as it moves up toward state power, whereas authoritarianism is an expression of power struggles among elites. While this approach, with its distinguishing characteristics, assists with nuancing how we think about the rise of fascism and its relationship to authoritarianism in the global south, this does not mean a U.S.‐supported fascism did not take root in the global south in the twentieth century.…”

“…See Griffin (), Eatwell (), Mann (), Riley (), and Passmore (), for example. An exception is the world‐system analysis of fascism (Goldfrank , ; Amin ).…”