‘It's not right!’: Death as Gendered Experience in Contemporary South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the concept of ‘not-rightness’ is embedded in African women's talk and sense-making about death in present-day urban South Africa. Moving from a Christian NGO context in Pretoria's inner city to the surrounding townships, it focuses on the ways women NGO workers engage with notions of rights, empowerment and behavioural change in their concurrent roles as kin, burial society members, widows and lovers of deceased persons. It argues that the senses of not-rightness women express in relation to these gendered roles are newly animated by South Africa's turn to democracy and the dramatic impact of HIV/AIDS; senses which, if subtly, speak to locally salient, vernacularised conceptions of ‘women's rights’ and ‘fidelity’. Through two case studies – the first of the death of an elderly woman; the second of the murder of an interlocutor's boyfriend – the article elucidates the central role of death experiences in women's (re)conceptualisations of gender identity and subjectivity in the post-apartheid moment. More broadly, it reiterates the need to move beyond questions of the limits of rights-based rhetoric to analyses attentive to the complex, contingent and possibly contradictory ways people evoke such discourses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".