Nation building in post-Apartheid South Africa: Transforming gender and race relations through sports

South Africans experienced dramatic changes in the political and social orders of their nation during the 1990s. The long history of white minority rule officially ended in 1994 with the first democratic, all-race elections. During the political transition, a broad-based women's movement emerged and gender equality became an autonomous aspect of democratization in South Africa. Most of the scholarship on South Africa's political transition focuses on changing race and class relations and ignores shifting gender relations. In this dissertation, I take up the question of shifting gender relations in post-apartheid South Africa by examining grassroots efforts of women athletes to transform gender and race relations through sports. South African sport is of particular interest because the new government is using sport in the nation-building process. To understand women athletes' contributions to transforming social relations, I conduct a case comparison of women's competitive netball and soccer using both qualitative and quantitative data and methodologies. I base the analysis on 48 semi-structured interviews, 381 self-administered surveys, archival evidence, and participant observations. I draw from collective identity theory, as articulated in the social movement literature, and feminist theories of the interlocking systems of race, gender, and class inequalities. I bridge these two perspectives to expand our understanding of the ways structural inequalities both facilitate and impede the construction of collective identity among diverse groups. This analysis demonstrates that through the construction of new collective identities, women netballers are actively challenging dominant racial hierarchies and inequalities and women soccer participants are challenging dominant gender hierarchies and categories. This research contributes to current debates among South African scholars and activists about the sustainability of a racial diverse women's movement and the development of theories on the dialectics of race, gender, and class. This study vividly illustrates that South African women are not a unified, homogenous group who shares common interests. Sisterhood, or a collective identity, among South African women can only be forged through concrete historical practices. Finally, this analysis adds to the literature on gender and social movements by demonstrating the role movement actors play in transforming racial and gender categories and hierarchies.