Aliens in the University

Although “woman is not a genitalist category” (Spivak Reference Spivak1999:231), 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.^{Footnote 1} Based on Enlightenment-era concepts, the scholar has traditionally been figured as a solitary, dispassionate male whose intellect is completely disconnected from the needs and processes of his body.^{Footnote 2} Upon producing an acceptable amount of intellectual work on a strict schedule, he “is rewarded with a lifetime position” (Stockdell-Geisler & Ingalls Reference Stockdell-Giesler and Ingalls2007:38). Paradoxically, however, the physical body from which his intellect is separated must also rigidly conform to a particular phenotype. Thus, traditional academic knowledge is produced on schedule by men with intangible yet flawless bodies. Other people (in other bodies) find themselves, in effect, to be alienated (both literally and figuratively) in the university. Other ways of knowing and pathways of knowledge that they may produce are devalued, belittled, ignored, or categorized as impossibly exotic (Jagger 1995:156). Falling among such aliens, for example, are people who are blind, physically disabled in other ways, or coping with chronic illness. Academics with these profiles have written about how the physical conditions of their bodies are contingencies that place them outside the symbolic order of knowledge production (see, e.g., Michalko Reference Michalko, Freedman and Holmes2003:74), and about how they consequently battle to be taken seriously as thinkers by their students and colleagues (see, e.g., Smith Reference Smith, Freedman and Holmes2003). To the extent that their bodies differ from the traditional phenotype, they are distanced from the assumption that they have a right and the ability to exercise epistemological authority in the academy (see Freedman & Holmes Reference Freedman and Holmes2003). Thus, although the lives of the mind and the body are conceptualized as separated, they are also invisibly intertwined in such a way as to privilege some people while rendering the core, intimate spaces of university life off limits to others.

Women (of all phenotypical descriptions) make up the largest group of alienated bodies in the university. As the scholars referenced above have noted, women’s physical difference is traditionally considered to render them congenitally unable to partake in the exercise of cool, dispassionate intellect. Not only do their bodies lack the required physical markers of masculinity, but women themselves also constantly threaten to expose their flawed corporeality. Women’s bodies are all too tangible. As Helene Cixous wrote in 1976, women “go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (1976:887).

Elsewhere I have written of higher education institutions in Africa as being characterized by “politics of the mind and of the body.” My analysis was based on the idea that African institutions have thoroughly imbibed the classic Westernized epistemological dichotomy that intellectualism and the production of knowledge are the province of men, while women’s role in higher education is expressed differently, in varied ways through their physicality. I wrote,

Institutions do not just grapple with these questions as hypothetical discursive formulations; women do pose very real threats of exuding real matter, actual physical substances of many kinds, in academic spaces. Women—especially pregnant women—are apt to explode invisibly in hormones and visibly in tears, menstrual blood, breast milk, or amniotic fluid (Longhurst Reference Longhurst2000b; Baraitser Reference Baraitser2009:123–24). Thus their physicality constantly threatens to foment emotion, disorder, messiness—a kind of feminized primitivism—in spaces ostensibly devoted to progress, reason, and objectivity.

The instinct to exclude pregnant women is surprising, in a way; whatever else it might be, pregnancy is obviously a culmination of heterosexuality. The pregnant body could thus be construed as “the concrete agent of patriarchy’s reproduction” in a heteronormative society (Walker Reference Walker1998:135) and logically, therefore, should find itself welcomed by traditionalist institutions. Further, scholars have noted the importance of female student bodies that display attraction-oriented heterosexual femininity in African university spaces, so much so that women students’ choice of clothing can become a heated national issue (see Odejide Reference Odejide2007; Bakare-Yusuf 2011; van de Merwe, 2011). At any rate, these dynamics do also provide support for the idea that women in universities are crucially considered in terms of their bodily attributes (see Murunga Reference Murunga and Oyewumi2005:405).

Welcome to UWC

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) was founded in 1960 as part of the apartheid project to restrict and control the provision of academic knowledge by race. One of the signature social engineering projects of the apartheid state, as implemented after 1959, was to assign entire universities, as well as funding, admissions, curricula, and hiring decisions, differentially according to racial group. In particular, the division of African people (who spoke one of South Africa’s several indigenous languages as mother tongue) from Coloured people (whose ancestors came from many communities, and who spoke Afrikaans or English) was a founding principle of apartheid higher education. UWC began as a second-rate facility to train lower-echelon Coloured professionals such as nurses, teachers, and clerks; the university was founded in an elementary school building, without schools of medicine, engineering, music, or fine arts. From the mid-1970s and especially in the mid-1980s, UWC expanded and broke decisively with this limited vision to redefine itself as an institution dedicated to social justice and the inclusive ideals of the antiapartheid movement. In the late 1980s it famously proclaimed itself as the “intellectual home of the left” in South Africa, and opened up admissions fully to African students. Following the achievement of majority rule and democracy in 1994, UWC sent many staff and graduates into the ranks of the new majority government. It also began the slow, painful process of clawing itself out of the financial abyss into which it had fallen by virtue of purposefully enrolling scores of poor students who could not pay their tuition fees, and of having been on the receiving end of punitive funding from the apartheid state due to its left-leaning stance. To the surprise of many, the policies of the post-1994 South African state only partially addressed the historical disparities in the higher education sector, and UWC was largely left to its own devices (in some cases at its own request) in reestablishing itself on a sounder financial and progressive epistemological footing. Throughout, UWC has wrestled with what it means to produce a deracialized corpus of knowledge (Lalu & Murray Reference Lalu and Murray2012). Meanwhile, universities structured to serve white students during the apartheid era largely continued to build on their well-resourced infrastructural head starts.^{Footnote 3}

In 2008 UWC had a student body of approximately fourteen thousand students, of whom 60 percent were women. In the early 2000s it employed about 1,700 staff; women made up 51 percent of that cohort (Hames et al. Reference Hames, Beja, Kgosimmele and Bennett2005:154). Thus women were in the majority of both students and staff on campus. The vast majority of students were racially categorized as African and Coloured, and most came from relatively low-income households. In 2007 there were ten student residences (dormitories) on campus.

After 1994, one of the ways in which UWC gave real meaning to its progressive political stance was in the design and implementation of gender equity measures. According to Hames et al.,

These efforts also led to the formation of a campus Gender Equity Unit. Thus, as an institution, UWC was not only familiar with the principles of equity and gender transformation, but also took concrete steps to implement a range of measures that would, it was hoped, contribute to shifting its entrenched masculinist orientation.

The 2007 pregnancy policy marked a significant erosion of this aspiring culture of gender redress and fairness in several ways. First, of course, it severely restricted pregnant women’s access to higher education. Institutionally, it operationalized the concept that pregnancy was a problem to be addressed through formal policy implementation (Shaw Reference Shaw2004). At a personal level, the health risks faced by a pregnant student were significantly increased by denying her a roof over her head and easy access to the basic care provided on campus by its health clinic. Finally, in the era of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the policy codified a particularly poignant example of a denialist response to the reality of adult women students leading sexually active lives.^{Footnote 4}

The Problem Limps into View

The UWC academic year begins at the end of January and consists of four seven- or eight-week teaching terms. In the eleven years that I was on the UWC faculty, many students who came from low-income households had difficulties in paying their tuition, and often spent the first weeks of the school year admitted but unregistered, searching for money. If the required funds came to hand, they were allowed to register almost up until the very end of the term. In 2008 I was teaching a second-year history course. When a woman student whom I had never seen before approached me at the end of the very last week of the first term asking what she had missed in the previous six weeks, I inwardly groaned at the prospect of re-teaching the entire term’s work to yet another student. Then she told me her story.

This student—let’s call her Yoliswa—came from Worcester, a town located about 100 kilometers from Cape Town. She had registered at the beginning of 2008, paid the required tuition fees, and was allocated a room in one of the student residences. But when she arrived on campus the residence staff refused to electronically validate her student ID card, which would have allowed her entry to her room. They saw that she was pregnant—about six months along.

They were following orders. Toward the end of 2007 it had come to the attention of the local news media and of the staff of the UWC Gender Equity Unit that the university’s Residential Administration Office had informed women students of a new university policy: they would have to vacate their rooms in the residence halls if they were pregnant (Keating Reference Keating2007a). Ironically, this patently unconstitutional policy had been written in the language of human rights.^{Footnote 5}

Meetings were held in the residences with women students who were told that they would not be allowed to remain if they were seen to be visibly pregnant. And thus in early 2008, Yoliswa was barred entry to her room. Her only option to continue her education was to travel back and forth from Worchester to UWC on the train, hours every day. This was uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive. So she was forced to stay at home; UWC did not have online classes and she fell behind in her work. The doors of learning—to borrow a phrase from South Africa’s famous Freedom Charter—had been slammed shut in her face.

Yoliswa gave birth a few weeks early via cesarean section without complications and returned to campus in the last week of the first term, when I met her. Following the one-week university holiday, she returned full-time for the beginning of the second term. This time she was allowed to take up her room in the student residence hall. She had registered for a full academic load and was also trying to make plans with her professors about how to cover the work she had missed in the first term. UWC does not have a particularly large campus, but Yoliswa had a lot of ground to cover to visit both sets of professors. And now I saw that she was limping badly. I asked her what was wrong. She said she had developed blood clots in her legs after her surgery, and was limping from the pain. I questioned her closely because I knew from personal experience how painful a blood clot could be, and I knew that postoperative blood clots were potentially life threatening. Yoliswa said that she was on blood thinning medication; but since she was in pain and limping so badly I insisted that she go immediately to Student Health Services. The campus doctor sent her home and her own doctor in Worcester then sent her straight to the hospital.

Other Bans on Pregnant Bodies

Other universities have struggled with a perceived mismatch between student pregnancy and spaces of higher learning. The issue has surfaced intermittently in the U.S. In 1987 an African American student at Baylor University sued for the return of her tuition fees after being forced to withdraw because she was pregnant and unmarried. Reportedly, university officials had told her that Baylor “has a reputation to keep and we can’t have you walking around pregnant” (The New York Times 1989). A 1997 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reviewed a number of cases of American college students who had concealed their pregnancies and delivered in secret. Some of the cases ended tragically with the deaths of the infants and the students indicted for murder (Geraghty Reference Geraghty1997). In 2001 the Virginia Military Institute (which had been forced by the U.S. Supreme Court to admit women in 1996) passed a regulation that required any female cadet who became pregnant to withdraw (Rosenbaum Reference Rosenbaum2003). In 2006 the case of Vanessa Elise Jimenez, a student at Wellesley College, came to light. After returning to Wellesley pregnant after a year of volunteer work abroad, Jimenez was told that the college’s policy precluded students from living with their children in university dormitories. Her room-and-board grant was rescinded, forcing her to find off-campus accommodation for herself and her baby. Her finances eventually dwindled to the extent that she had to transfer to a college near her home town in Texas to complete her studies (Farrell Reference Farrell2006). The issue has occasionally come up elsewhere as well. At the University of Goroka in Papua New Guinea in 2004, pregnant students were told to leave campus to prevent them from “distracting other students” (Papua New Guinea Post-Courier 2004).

I have not been able to find another example of a ban on pregnant students in an African university. However, the struggles over ensuring that pregnant schoolgirls on the African continent continue to have access to secondary education (Chilisa Reference Chilisa2002) suggest that such issues are unlikely to automatically fall away at the tertiary level. In South Africa, where the legal age of majority is eighteen, the nexus of pregnancy and education most often arises in the context of teenage schoolgirl pregnancy. Since 1996 it has been South African government policy that pregnant girls should not be expelled from school.^{Footnote 6}

It should also be noted that abortion was legalized in South Africa with the passage of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996. Termination services are available in public sector clinics, and the practice at the UWC student health clinic was to refer students to such public services. Nationally, demand for abortion services has been rising and public sector providers are seriously overstretched. Research conducted on other South African university campuses suggests that in making their choices about pregnancy and childbearing, women students must navigate a complex atmosphere of changing gender norms, human rights discourses, cultural and religious beliefs, and exposure to sex education curricula and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Further research would be required to ascertain the extent to which UWC students actually chose pregnancy as a positive goal, or whether they had been influenced to retain their pregnancies through distaste for or lack of access to abortion services. For whatever the reason, the university clearly perceived that there were sufficient numbers of pregnant students in the residences to warrant the development of its pregnancy policy.^{Footnote 7}

Academic Policy and Power

Many members of the UWC community were outraged when they heard about the university’s new policy in late 2007 and early 2008. The elected leadership of the student body protested to university management (Keating Reference Keating2007b). Led by the staff of the Gender Equity Unit, UWC faculty and staff sent a stream of e-mails to the manager of Residential and Catering Services and put the issue on the agenda of the university Senate. They argued that the policy was discriminatory and clearly unconstitutional; that pregnancy is not an illness; and that professionals in the university’s nursing, social work, and public health programs had not been consulted in drawing up the policy. It was pointed out that living in a residence was probably one of the medically safest options for a pregnant student; that a local hospital with a full maternity unit was located only ten minutes away from campus; and finally, that being pregnant on campus was not like being pregnant on an airplane.

University management responded by claiming that the policy was only a draft, and a promise was made to consult all relevant stakeholders about its fate.^{Footnote 8} The Vice-Rector for Student Development then told a 2008 University Senate meeting that the policy was on hold while her office consulted with other universities about their policies on student pregnancy.^{Footnote 9} In fact, however, Yoliswa’s story demonstrated that in the first half of 2008 the policy had already progressed to its full implementation stages. As they were physically prevented from attending university by a policy that officially did not exist, pregnant women students found themselves in a Kafkaesque twilight zone.

Body Languages

The policy affected pregnant African women most directly, because they were the female students most likely to be living in the university residences.^{Footnote 10} How have pregnant African bodies figured in academic discourses?

The dominant intellectual work on the social construction of bodies comes from the Western tradition; the linguistic turn tells us of conventions and representations that are “written on the body”: that, in a quote from Foucault, “the body is the strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and constraint” (quoted in Dunlop Reference Dunlop, Abbey and O’Reilly1998:118). Thus, the monitoring and expression of sexuality anchor the individual’s sense of self (Kirby Reference Kirby and Nnaemeka2005:87). These discourses of embodiment relate directly to the analysis of the UWC policy because it was specifically pregnancy (rather than “mere” femaleness) that rendered women unable to remain in the intellectual space of the university. Thus, female students would be allowed to learn and exercise their intellects as long as they looked and behaved like piles of nulliparous flesh; as long as they could be, in other words, socially constructed as pseudo-male. The mind/body split, so integral to the Enlightenment conception of knowledge, was reproduced by the efforts to make markedly female bodies disappear.

This exclusionary distinction was made possible, of course, by the fact that a pregnant woman is so visibly marked by her swelling belly and the threat that it might start to leak uncontrollably—with the vomit of morning sickness, with blood, amniotic fluid, or breast milk, perhaps even with a fetus. Pregnancy can thus be operationally defined as a kind of pollution. In the words of Robyn Longhurst,

However, simply defining pregnancy as pollution is problematic in an African context in which reproduction is generally considered to have a special and important status (see Win Reference Win and Tamale2011). Furthermore, African and Asian feminist historical scholarship sternly warns us not to assume that Western constructions of body politics are universal. Amadiume (Reference Amadiume1987) and Oyewumi (Reference Oyewumi1997, Reference Oyewumi and Oyewumi2005, Reference Oyewumi and Zeleza2006), for example, dispute the concepts that gender roles must be strongly linked to bodily attributes and that gender automatically implies social destiny. Rather, they argue that the Western preoccupation with embodiment and sexuality has obscured the platforms of age and seniority in African social hierarchies. They argue that mother-status is a foundational, relational (rather than physical) social category, and that the pregnant body assumes a correspondingly positive and significant position because of what it portends about the assurance of social reproduction.^{Footnote 11} Thus, “children are viewed as sacred, motherhood as a benediction, and childbearing as a sign of women’s strength and power” (Turrittin Reference Turrittin, Allman, Geiger and Musisi2002:77).

Therefore, UWC’s pregnancy policy poses many fundamental questions. Did the university’s attempt to ban pregnant students from its residences imply that it was not, at its core, an African institution? Or does it suggest that we must revise and enlarge our definitions of Africanness to include such cases (see Ajayi Reference Ajayi, Goma and Johnson1996)? Did it signal an institution mired, despite its admirable human rights record, in “the abject script of apartheid” (Lalu Reference Lalu2007:45)? Was it a manifestation of an intellectual and institutional failure to reconceive the very meanings of humanity and freedom after the end of apartheid (see Mbembe Reference Mbembe2012)?

Let us examine the particularities of this clash between institutional culture and pregnant bodies. According to Bennett and Reddy (Reference Bennett and Reddy2007), the South African academy has been slow to take on issues of gender and sexuality outside a biomedical framework; thus there is little homegrown material for university administrators to work with. Gasa (2007:226) has written that nationally, “motherist” movements (for which pregnancy is, of course, a prerequisite) “have played important [political] roles in specific contexts” (see also van de Merwe 2011); but the proud traditions of women’s political organizing in South Africa are still often held to be corollaries to the main tracks of the struggle against apartheid.^{Footnote 12} Thus, despite UWC’s stated commitments of the mid-1990s to gender equity, women’s rights could still be classified by the university as secondary to the needs of the institution for order and financial stability.

Meanwhile, African women in the UWC dormitories stubbornly continued to exercise their agency. Motsemme’s analysis of young women’s lives in a Gauteng township gives us a clue to understanding these decisions.

In a society so deeply scarred by institutionalized racial injustice and its legacies, the idea that there were racial overtones in a pregnancy policy that was being exclusively implemented on female bodies of color (given that there were so few white students at UWC) should be considered. Yvette Abrahams has written most sensitively about the incapacity of institutional insiders to even conceptualize the physicality of black women’s bodies in the South African academy. Abrahams does not work with the idea of pregnancy, but she has written,

The pregnancy policy could thus also be read as indexing some erosion of UWC’s proud antiracist traditions. Like Abrahams, Yoliswa and her pregnant UWC colleagues were confronted by racialized and gendered hierarchies of power in which they had, intersectionally, become “brown sex objects”—not citizens with rights, students with needs, thinkers with ideas, or even clients who had paid for educational services—but unsightly problems to be pushed away.

Bodies of Knowledge

What knowledge(s) can bodies that are not male or able bodied explicitly bring to the academy? Pregnancy is surely the foremost example of specialized knowledge anchored in the body—as in the process of giving birth, when the body takes over, contracting and heaving purposefully without conscious direction or control. Lorentzen’s (Reference Lorentzen2008) exploration of knowledge, power, and resistance in pregnancy is apposite here. She argues in a Foucauldian framework that the shared production of power relations between patient and physician can produce both compliance and resistance; and that although certain institutionalized medical knowledges are privileged by the health care establishment, women’s embodied experiential knowledge also inevitably comes into play in the maternal experience.

Lorentzen’s work is framed in a paradigm of external power and embodied resistance. A related and historically specific example of this relationship in the South African setting is the embodied practice of racial self-classification, or “passing”—a time-honored strategy for dealing with the insanities of apartheid racial classification. As Judith Butler has written, the strategy of passing poses questions of “what can and cannot be spoken, what can and cannot be publicly exposed…and…it is linked with the larger question of the dangers of public exposure of both color and desire” (1993:147). The idea that South African women might choose to “pass” reproductively, as many chose to do in relation to racial identity, does not require an extended stretch of the imagination. For example, according to a recent study, Coloured farm workers in the Western Cape regularly conceal their pregnancies from employers, families, and even themselves.

Reproductive passing was implicitly encouraged and rewarded by the UWC pregnancy policy: a pregnant woman who successfully passed would be able to continue to live in the dormitories and retain her student status. But passing was a problematic strategy. It was inequitable, not least because it was not available to all pregnant women; when she waddled into view at the turnstiles of the university residence with her six-month-sized belly, the UWC Residential Life staff were able to turn Yoliswa away because she was too large to pass as nonreproductive, as a “non-breeder” (see Vostral Reference Vostral2008). Other women’s bodies might have accomplished this subterfuge. A strategy of passing also encouraged women to “deny, cut off or split off parts of themselves”—carrying many harmful implications. Passing as nonpregnant would put the woman and her unborn child at distinct medical risk with a disincentive to seek prenatal care; this when maternal mortality has been the leading cause of premature death and disability among women of reproductive age in South Africa as in other developing countries.^{Footnote 13} Psychologically, a strategy of passing would also encourage a kind of schizophrenia as an institutional wedge was forced down between the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the body.

Yoliswa did not allow herself to become a victim of such institutionalized misogyny. She returned to the university and successfully fought to complete her education. But there was a painful private cost of her public perseverance which she should not have had to bear.

Acknowledgments

Versions of this article were presented at the “Gender Justice and Body Politics” conference, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, February 2009; and at an Education Faculty seminar, University of the Western Cape, July 2012. I would like to thank Neetha Ravjee and Mary Hames for their support and assistance, and the editors and anonymous readers of ASR for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to salute the staff of the UWC Gender Equity Unit for their work for educational transformation over many years.