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Mothers, Cousins, Sisters, Friends: Black South African Relations in Date My Family
Abstract
This article explores representations of black South African family structure in the popular local reality television programme Date My Family. Focusing on visual and verbal discourses, it considers the programme's cultural relevance, presentation of social circumstances and understandings of black South African identity in relation to family structure. Within the world of Date My Family, western/European conceptions of the nuclear family, so often valorised within reality TV, are renegotiated, and families exhibit the more commonly African extended form. At the same time gender relations within these families shift away from apparently traditional modes, with female-headed households and absent fathers common. The extended families that feature in Date My Family reflect the fluidity and variability of contemporary norms of gender and family among black South Africans.
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Notes
In using the terms “black” and “white” we refer not to simplistic, faux-biological binaries of skin colour but rather, following Erasmus, to “the ways in which hierarchical structures of meaning attached to skin colour have shaped people's material lives as well as their perceptions of themselves, of others, and of the world around them”. These meanings are not fixed – “people struggle over [them] and they change over time and from one context to another” (Erasmus, 2005, p. 10).
The remaining numbers were comprised of couples, single people, households of unrelated adults, single parents and unspecific groupings.
Research suggests an alarming trend to this increase, in which “the majority of new female employment happens in the informal sector and the poorest paid sector of the labour market, namely the social or service sector, as domestic and retail workers which are traditionally defined by gender as women's work” (Parry and Segalo, 2017, p. 183).