Dr Nadia Sanger (on sabbatical 2024)

Associate Professor
PhD (UWC)
Send e-mail

TEACHING AREAS

Enslavement then, now, and in the future; Slavery in the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor and Octavia Butler; Speculative fiction in Africa; Feminist perspectives on experimental film; Zoe Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town;  Stephen Frear’s Dirty Pretty Things; Of multifarious ancestry: South African stories of oppression and agency; Politics of gender, race, class and sexuality,

PUBLICATIONS 

BOOKS IN PROCESS
  • With Benita Moolman. African feminist perspectives on race, racism and ethnicity: an anthology.
  • On race, cultural production and imagining differently: a collection of essays.
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES
  • 2013. With Vasu Reddy.  Ageing and Intergenerationality, Agenda Special Issue.
BOOK CHAPTERS
  • 2013. With Cherith Sanger. ‘The Best Interests of the Child’: Reflecting on the Family and the Law as Sites of Oppressive Hetero-Socialisation (pp. 50-57). In C. Lubbe-De Beer and J. Marnell (Eds.) Home Affairs: Rethinking Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Families. Johannesburg: Fanele and GALA.
SELECTED PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
  • Sanger, N & Lynch, I. 2017. ‘You have to bow right here’: heteronormative scripts and intimate partner violence in women’s same-sex relationships, Culture, Health & Sexuality, DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2017.1338755.
  • Matters of Age: An Introduction to Ageing, Intergenerationality and Gender in Africa”Agenda: Special Issue on Ageing and Intergenerationality, 94 (2013)
  • ‘Living Ancestors’: Gabrielle Le Roux in conversation with Nadia Sanger, Agenda: Special Issue on Ageing and Intergenerationality, 94 (2013)
  • Imagining possibilities: feminist cultural production, non-violent identities, and embracing the Other in post-colonial South Africa, African Identities, 11.1 (2013)
  • Review essay on Oliver Hermanus’ Shirley Adams, Agenda: Gender, sexuality and commodity culture, 25. 4 (2011)
  • ‘The real problems need to be fixed first’: public discourses on sexuality and gender in South Africa, Agenda:  Feminisms Today, Special Issue, 24. 83 (2010)
  • Challenging patriarchal scripts? A gender analysis of South Africa’s community print media”, Agenda: Community Media, Special Issue, 22.77 (2009)
  • New women, old messages? Constructions of femininities, race and hypersexualised bodies in selected South African magazines, 2003–2006, Social Dynamics, 35. 1 (2009)
  • ’There’s got to be a man in there’: Reading intersections between gender, race and sexuality in South African magazines, African Identities, 6. 3 (2008)
  • ’We cannot at any stage be seen to be political, as we are not here to engender change, but to inspire’: magazine editors and notions of objectivity and neutrality, Journal of Media and Gender Diversity, 3 (2007)
  • Marginalized and demonized: lesbians and equality – perceptions of people in a local Western Cape community”, Agenda, 67 (2007)
ONLINE PUBLICATIONS
  • 2014. ‘On not being young black girl’, ActITFem, available at http://actitfem.co.za/
  • 2013. ‘On killing Tiny Insect’, femtwine: making feminist connections, available at http://femtwine.wordpress.com/
  • 2013. Summary of report: Safely queer on the urban peripheries of Cape Town: A comparative study exploring how ‘class’ and space mediate sexual identities for gender non-conforming youth on the urban peripheries of Cape in South Africa. HSRC, Cape Town.
  • 2013. “Ungrievable life”,  Mail and Guardian Thoughtleader, 4 January 2013, available at http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/nadiasanger/2013/05/28/ungrievable-life/
  • 2013. ‘Love thy neighbor, love thy dog’, Mail and Guardian Thoughtleader, 4 January 2013, available at http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/nadiasanger/2013/01/04/love-thy-neighbour-love-thy-dog/
  • 2012. ‘Men, dogs, violence, and fear’, Mail and Guardian Thoughtleader, 7 February, available at http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/readerblog/2012/02/07/men-dogs-violence-and-fear/
  • 2011. ‘Review: Reading Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases and Difficult Love’, available at http://www.zanelemuholi.com/Review%20ZM_Nadia%20Sanger.pdf
  • 2010. ‘Women’s rights and lesbian rights: feminist principles, identities, and heteronormativity in the South African women’s movement’, HBS Perspectives Publication Series, 04.10: 24-28.
  • 2010. ‘Animals have feelings too: the links between South African feminist thought and the subjugation of other animals’, Mail and Guardian, April 9th -15th.
  • 2010. When nationhood is a cover for blatant homophobia, Cape Times, 5th March.
  • 2010. With Cheryl Roberts. World Cup maketh man, not woman, Cape Argus, 3rd March.
  • 2009. Xenophobic attitudes, gender and sexuality, HSRC Review, Vol. 7 (2): 24-25.
  • 2009. Spotlight of curiosity shines harshly on Semenya, Cape Argus, 21st August.
  • 2007. Scripts of Western Heteronormativity: South African ‘lifestyle’ Magazines and (hetero)socialisation, Sexuality in Africa Magazine, 4 (2).
SELECTED CONFERENCES AND DISCUSSIONS
  • 2015. #SONA: the (ir)relevance of feminism 101? Panel discussion. Talking the Walk seminar, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town
  • 2013. Sexual politics, space and agency: discourses of gender non-conforming young people on the urban peripheries of Cape Town. University of Johannesburg Sociology, Anthropology & Development Studies, Wednesday Seminar Series
  • 2013. Theorising intersectionality and assemblage. Panel discussion, Women’s and Gender Studies Department, University of the Western Cape
  • 2012. With Benita Moolman. ‘Race, sexual desire, and identity in post-apartheid South Africa’, Festival of Desire, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town
  • 2012. ‘Race and racial terminology in research’, HSRC capacity building seminar, HSRC, Cape Town
  • 2012. Thando Mgqolozana’s ‘A man who is not a man’: scripting black masculinities through static culture, Where are all the men? Critical perspectives on masculinities, Multi-Event, University of the Western Cape
  • 2012. Response to Lucy Graham’s State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature, Humanities Book Lunch, HUMA, University of Cape Town
  • 2012. ‘In the middle of the story: Reflecting on feminist theory, epistemology, and practice in engaging gender non-conforming persons on the Cape Flats communities of South Africa’, 2nd International Sociology Association Forum of Sociology, Social Justice and Democratisation, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • 2012. “Feminist research methodologies and practice in ‘the field’: reflexivity, gender, class, ‘race’, and sexuality”, 30th International Congress of Psychology Conference, International Cape Town International Convention Centre
  • 2012. ‘The role of the humanities in shaping the social sciences’, A Man Who is Not a Man: Youth, masculinities, culture and the humanities, HSRC Seminar Series, HSRC, Cape Town
  • 2011. ‘The language of violence: thoughts about violence and power’, Violence against Women: Post-apartheid Conversations, Loud Enuf, Gender Equity Unit and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape
  • 2011. ‘A question of liberation: Possibilities for re-thinking subjectivity and personhood in the work of South African cultural producers, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo’, Women’s Studies Department, State University of New York, Albany, United States
  • 2010. ‘Public discourses on gender and sexuality in South Africa: possibilities of resistance through feminist visual cultural production’, Department of Women’s Studies, Penn State University, PA, United States
  • 2008. ‘Unnamed men and available women: Connecting the popular, the personal and the political in racialised hyperheterosexual representations of women in South African magazines’, Gender Activism: Perspectives on the South African transition, institutional cultures and everyday life, Rosa Luxemburg Annual Seminar, The Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Rhodes University
  • 2007. ‘Performing heteromasculinities in South African men’s magazines’, Taking a hard look: Gender and Visual Culture Conference, Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Pretoria
  • 2006. ‘Whose teaching whom? Interrogating subjectivities in the teaching of literature in post-apartheid South Africa’, Fulbright-Hayes Project Abroad, Program to SA Conference, University of the Western Cape
  • 2005. ‘Constructions of whiteness, gender, class and sexuality in South African English-medium men’s and women’s magazines’, Feminist Intellectual Activism: Within and Beyond the Academy Conference, University of the Western Cape.