Art Journal: 2020

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Attending a White Catholic All-Girls School: Collisions of Race and Gender

Introduction

The politics of gender and sexuality within the contemporary state of all-girls missionary schools is sedimented by a complex colonial history. Through autoethnographic techniques, I wish to inspect my high school and primary school experience at an all-girls Catholic missionary school in East Gauteng by reframing my daily life through a sociopolitical lens of investigation. I was a closeted, white transgender non-binary person living under a dead name in an upper middle-class suburb less than ten minutes away from my school. I attended 13 years of gendered, “women only” English Catholic schooling from the early 2000s till the late 2010s.

First I wish to elaborate upon how conservative sexism and racism are given political power within a missionary school environment due to an unaddressed colonial history and unreformed Christian ethos that empowers “post-racial”, neoliberal forms of patriarchy. Secondly, I will reflect on the classifications of productive and reproductive labour within the academic and social spheres to unpack how power was maintained within the school by the staff and students. I develop what I see as the ultimate hyperfeminine Christian woman persona that thrived in this neocolonial social environment to fully illustrate what was expected of students.