The focus of this research study is on black South African women’s experiences of being
science students, becoming graduates and professionals, and the ways in which they
navigate institutional and disciplinary spaces that have historically been dominated by
white masculinities. Women scientists are living in a critical era as the socio-cultural and
political-economic landscape is transforming rapidly, affecting changes in aspects of
identity and processes of identification. The individual life histories of black South
African women scientists provide a telling story of a society in transformation because
they experience the world as an outlier group; paradoxically positioned within an
interstitial space between their dual sense of belonging to and alienation from a marginal
and an elite group. The racialised gender gap in STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines raises critical concerns around the political
nature of scientific enquiry and whether black women will achieve equity in society and
economic empowerment if they continue to be marginalised from society’s power
structures. Little is known about their journeys into becoming the new generation of
scientists in post-apartheid South Africa. Using a narrative method to enquire into the
lives of 14 young women, the aim of the study was to critically examine questions of
discursive, material and symbolic elements that emerge within their narratives across
temporal shifts, and how these new meanings reflect specific subjectivities, reconfigure
their dynamic social identities and transform time into ‘other spaces’ of belonging
beyond categories of social divisions.
I applied a structural analysis to the narrative form, an intersectional analysis of the
narrative content in order to identify discursive themes, while a narrative analysis was
applied to a portrait of one participant in order to depict the entanglement of form,
content and context of a life narrative. Based on the findings, a visual representation of a
‘lived life’ in relation to a ‘told story’ (Wengraf, 2011) is proposed as a useful device to
analyse the ways in which multiple, fragmented and contradictory selves are constructed
through narrative. By utilising these visual diagrams as a heuristic device, I claim that
there are particular features that complicate a person’s narrative identity, which I have
ii
organised into four patterns of storytelling, namely a ‘labyrinth storymaze’, a ‘simplyconnected
storymaze’, a ‘multiply-connected storymaze’ and a ‘weave storymaze’. It
seems that failure is a defining feature that complicates, ruptures and convolutes people’s
sense of their-selves through space-time.
This study presents a dialectical model for how black women scientists (co)construct
them-selves as scientists through recognition from significant others, (de)construct themselves
as scientists through misrecognition and failure, and (re)construct other selves
through homespaces, located at the intersection of (mis)recognition. Their
(co)constructed internalised ideal of ‘academic talent’ is fraught with contradictions in
the temporal flow of discursive themes in their life narratives, which account for how the
intersections of ‘race’, class and gender locations coalesce into a “matrix of oppression”
(Collins, 2002), positioning young black women as pawns in institutional and
disciplinary spaces. The findings disentangle the mutually reinforcing relations between
“epistemological access” (Morrow, 2007) and the dominant ideologies of whiteness and
masculinity within STEM fields, which are in conflict with the participants’ backgrounds,
thus contributing to their experiences of (c)overt discrimination, either through public
humiliation, silencing of black women and/or the preferential treatment of white students
from lecturers. The findings also indicate that these women resist systems of oppression
through everyday homespaces in which they reconstruct new meanings and subjectivities
through the narrative art that connect them to other spaces and to new “imagined
communities” (Anderson, 1991). The significance of this study lies in its contribution to
understanding personal and social change, particularly for marginalised groups that come
to occupy positions of power in both the production of knowledge and the functioning of
society.