Pregnancy and Bodies of Knowledge in a South African University

Abstract: Based on a classroom encounter of the author, this article explores the gendered nature of African university space. It discusses a 2007-8 policy that banned pregnant adult students from living in the student residence halls at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. The policy was implemented despite protests from the university's students and staff. The article argues that the more visibly reproductive a student's body became, the more alien it was considered to be in spaces of knowledge production. This alienation was incongruous at a university widely considered as the most politically progressive in South Africa. It was rooted, however, in Western-oriented traditions of masculinist knowledge production in which there is no space for the female, let alone the pregnant, body in intellectual spaces; and in South African traditions of marginalization, exclusion, and "passing" in public space. Exploring ideas of "body language" and "bodies of knowledge," the article concludes that there is a need for an interdisciplinary politics and epistemology of "seepage" in higher educational institutions that recognizes women's minds and their bodies.Resume: En se sur basant une rencontre scolaire avec l'auteur, cet article explore la nature sexuee de l'espace universitaire en Afrique. Nous examinons un reglement etabli en 2007-8 qui bannissait les etudiantes adultes enceintes des residences universitaires a l'universite du Western Cape a Cape Town en Afrique du sud. Ce reglement a ete mis en place en depit de manifestations menees par les etudiants et les employes de l'universite. Cet article soutient que plus le corps etudiant montrait des signes visibles de reproduction, plus il s'est trouve banni des lieux de production de la connaissance. Cette alienation etait incongrue dans l'universite reconnue comme la plus progressiste en Afrique du Sud. Ce reglement etait enracine dans des traditions occidentales intellectuelles sexistes dans lesquelles il n'y a pas de place pour la femme et encore moins la femme enceinte, ainsi que dans des traditions sud-africaines de marginalisation, d'exclusion et de passage dans l'espace public. En explorant les idees de langage corporel et d'etendue des connaissances, cet article conclut qu'il y a un besoin pour une politique interdisciplinaire et une epistemologie de la "fuite" dans les institutions d'education superieure qui reconnaissent a la fois l'esprit et le corps feminins.Write yourself. The body must be heard. (Helene Cixous)To see knowledge, power, and agency in the margins is to wrestle withcontradictions.... (Obioma Nnaemeka)Poverty is humiliating; marginalization kills people; hunger is physical:I am not being metaphorical. (Shimberlee Jiron-King)IntroductionThis article analyzes a clash between institutional culture at a South African university and the bodies and rights of pregnant students. The clash occurred at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town in 2007-8, when the university administration developed and implemented a policy that banned pregnant students from living on campus in university residences. I argue that this story illuminates several important dynamics in contemporary South African higher education: the continuing power of masculinist paradigms of Western-style knowledge; an irresolute institutional commitment to gender equity; and lingering echoes of racial categorization. Taken together, these factors alert us to educational policymaking that continues to privilege misogynist cultures of knowledge production, and to a certain hollowness in the new culture of constitutional rights in democratic South Africa.Aliens in the UniversityAlthough "woman is not a genitalist category" (Spivak 1999:231), there are registers in which meanings of human embodiment are codified and constructed. One such register, the subject of a well-developed literature, is the challenge that gendered corporeality has been considered to pose to knowledge production in the Western-style academy. …