Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters

written by Elaine R. Salo

Producing persons in Manenberg township South Africa

The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape Town’s inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

Elaine R. Salo

Elaine R. Salo, a feminist scholar and public intellectual, trained in anthropology at the University of Cape Town, completing her PhD at Emory University. She held positions at the University of the Western Cape, in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, from 1988 to 1999, moving to the University of Cape Town's African Gender Institute from 2000 to 2008, before leaving to become director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2013. She became an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, USA, in 2014.