Boas Lecture: "Women Miners Negotiating Identity in South Africa’s Platinum Mines"
Professor Asanda-Jonas Benya
From the early industrial mining period until 2002, women were prohibited from performing underground work in South African mines, except in Asbestos mines. It was only in 2004 that mines started employing women in full-time underground occupations. Drawing from my ethnographic research, where I worked with mineworkers underground for a year, I will focus on the making of women’s subjectivities in micro-mining spaces such as the cage, change house and underground. Popular culture and mining literature tend to treat “the mine” as a monolithic and neutral space. This invisibilises and mutes significant micro-spaces and gendering processes that occur in them. In this seminar I will demonstrate that there is no monolithic 'mine space' but multiple and contested gendered and gendering spaces. I hope to illustrate how mining spaces, their rhythms and logics, are a constitutive factor in the making of gendered subjectivities.
Asanda-Jonas Benya (Ph.D.) is a Sociologist based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research interests revolve around critical labour studies, feminist and labour movements, extractive industries, social and economic justice with a focus on mining communities. Her main research project has been an ethnographic study of women underground miners in South Africa’s platinum mines. She is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University where she is working on her book project based on her ethnographic study on women miners. Her recent publications include Quiet rebels: underground women miners and refusal as resistance (2023), A patchwork quilt of patriarchies”: women’s experiences of belonging in South Africa’s mining unions (2023). She is the co-editor of the double-volume series on Lives of Extractions and the Afterlives of Extractions (Brill, 2023).