When Pumla Dineo Gqola coined the term “female fear factory” in a chapter of her 2016 book, Rape: A South African Nightmare, she had no idea how the phrase would catch on. Neither did she realise that her wide-reaching analysis of the many ways in which SA’s women are brutalised would be such a runaway success. (Rape: A South African Nightmare won the Alan Paton Award and is one of the most widely read and cited texts on rape in many countries around the world.)
Her new book, Female Fear Factory, looks at how fear is produced and how fearful women are mass manufactured.
Gqola’s central theme is that male-dominated society is a kind of factory that churns out women infused with fear. Not only are we created to be malleable, our buy-in to these systems means that we continue to police ourselves as fragile beings in need of protection.
This new exploration grew out of what she initially thought was a casual throwaway phrase, says Gqola.
It’s quite simple: patriarchy needs fear; it needs fear in order to have our compliance
“It was just supposed to be a little part of explaining how patriarchy trains women and sexual minorities — all the people that patriarchy likes to brutalise either because they are constructed as female or because they trouble some other claim that patriarchy makes. It was just a small cog in this larger project that I was interested in, in thinking about rape.
“Then, after the big surprise success of that book, people kept expecting me to talk about the ‘female fear factory’ and I began to think a lot more about it.
“It’s quite simple: patriarchy needs fear; it needs fear in order to have our compliance as women — and also other brutalised groups but mostly women — and there is a way in which this fear is constantly produced. And once we are afraid, then we police ourselves, we do the work of patriarchy ourselves because patriarchy always dangles this carrot of safety, which is ever elusive. From the time we are little girls we are taught to be afraid of going out on our own, to constantly want protection, to know that we are not safe.
“As I wrestled more with this concept I realised that this fear doesn’t only work in terms of rape. So in this book I try to think about how fear is constructed in relation to other forms of violence or other ways of socialising us into femininity.
Pushing women back into the home in the name of safety has not done us any favours
“In looking for ways in which fear becomes part of the socialisation of women, I came across all these scholarly papers on how girls — not even necessarily in the context of violence — are socialised into femininity. For example, when we think about adventure, when we think about being daring, boys are often encouraged to do this.
“I’d always thought boys are encouraged and girls are not encouraged, but part of what became clear to me as I went more into this body of scholarship was that it’s not just that girls are not encouraged, they are actively discouraged from being adventurous, and the way in which they are discouraged is through fear.
“So actually the production of femaleness itself and of femininity is itself reliant on fear.”
Scholar’s mind
Speaking from her book-lined home office in East London, Gqola is animated and ardent about her subject. You can almost see her scholar’s mind running at lightning speed as she considers questions, choosing and discarding words to build valid arguments.
Those students fortunate enough to be in her classes might sometimes struggle to keep up with her rapid lateral thought patterns, but it is a joy to watch such a mind at work.
Debating aloud whether Generation Z — or at least those young people she teaches — are more progressive in terms of gender equality than their forebears, Gqola says: “I’m certainly seeing much larger numbers of people who are questioning … I’m seeing a lot more young men who are questioning conventional masculinities and patriarchal masculinities, but strangely I’m also still seeing either very conservative masculinities or a very defensive kind of masculinity, that’s like a male fragility almost … But much more worrying for me, in much of the culture among young people today, are the ways in which the assertiveness, which is a good thing, and the calling each other out, which is a good thing, do not seem to leave room for changing … I worry that some of the ways in which young people are holding each other accountable are not really creating room for people to learn and to shift and to change.
“Nobody learns when they’re being yelled down. I’m not saying nobody needs to be yelled down, but I worry about what it means to be challenged in ways that force you to get stuck in a conservative mould or in a problematic mould at that age. It makes the possibility of seeing another point of view so scary that it kind of moves you away from that.
“So that’s what I worry about a bit, but I also think maybe it’s a generational thing, maybe I’m projecting that, maybe there is a way, maybe I just … I’m 48, I just can’t imagine that I could learn under those conditions but maybe I’m a person of a different time and perhaps it is possible.”
Setback for women
Gqola, a professor at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, lives with her mother and 13-year-old son in East London. They had planned to move closer to her work but then the lockdown happened.
Gqola does not dwell on the pandemic in her book, but she does think that in many ways it might prove to be a setback for women.
“I do think that pushing women back into the home in the ways that we have, in the name of safety, has not done us any favours. We know that homes are not necessarily places of safety for many women but even in contexts where there isn’t violence … there are times I feel like a 1950s housewife and I don’t even live with a man, so if I’m feeling it I can’t imagine how it must be for others.
“This is not necessarily tied to fear, but I do feel there is a patriarchal loss of footing that we are going to experience as a result of lockdown: first, around being pushed back into the home in ways that are reminiscent of a different era; second, the constant in many workplaces, where working from home is spoken of as though it means the same thing as it would normally, when kids are at school and so on … whereas for many people the capacity to work virtually has not actually been an advantage, especially in a country like ours, where the vast majority of women parent alone.”
For a person steeped in the study of fear, injustice, inequality and often violence, Gqola radiates a calm optimism. She admits that there are times she feels despair.
“Sometimes I fall into a hole but I think I’m just an eternal optimist. I really think that we can shift it, and maybe it’s naivety that energises me. It can be frustrating and I do despair sometimes, but I am also incredibly hopeful. I am energised by the specific ways in which we are talking about things more and … by how many women are just sick of things, I see an unapologetic anger that is energising.”
The last thing she wants to do, she says, is preach to people.
“The book works very hard to try and illustrate the whole web of fear and the structure of the factory of fear. I don’t need all my readers to be converted because then they agree with everything I say and they know everything I know and it’s kind of a boring book.
“I’m hoping that in the specific ways in which I use examples, that men, women, people of whatever gender, can maybe see something of the workings of and how they and we support the production of female fear factory. And I hope I tell enough stories of hope and possibility.”
I may not win, but I will fight with all my might
In the concluding chapter of Female Fear Factory, Gqola shares a diary entry from her life in Cape Town in 1995:
I read a newspaper report of a man who broke into a sleeping woman’s flat in Gardens. She lives on the third floor of a building but he manages to climb through her window. When she comes to, he is on top of her. I remember no further details about the story. I can think of nothing worse, even though reports of rape have been commonplace for as long as I have been aware of rape as something that exists in the world.
I am a very busy young woman. I am a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, a tutor in two different departments at this university, and a tutor at the Cape Technikon. My boyfriend and I go clubbing to the same joint with a group of friends every Friday and Saturday night. They play a lot of hip-hop and R&B and we are all obsessed with the kwaito group Boom Shaka. Yet, with all of this going on, I still have plenty of time for reading for pleasure, reading as research and writing my thesis. And lunch with Angelo, Gabeba, Kim and Maura every day. Sometimes with Drew and Colette too.
I am also a Rape Crisis counsellor. I am dedicated to this work, and find nothing more rewarding than seeing a woman or girl move from despair in the first counselling session to telling me in later sessions how her life has started returning to her. It can take years to fully return, long after our sessions are over. It may never fully return. Not all clients keep coming back but I have taught myself to stop wondering too hard. Instead, I hold on to the gratitude I feel for being able to do this work.
Ingrid, Ayanda and I are the odd ones out. Most other volunteers seem to either be psychologists or lawyers in training. Maybe it just seems that way. One of the almost-lawyers asks me if I think there are too many lesbians at Rape Crisis Observatory. She is always asking bizarre questions or saying things like this; I don’t always know how to answer her. This time I say no, there are probably just about enough lesbians. I don’t know what to make of her question. I like women who ask bizarre questions. And Rape Crisis is full of very strange, feminist women, many of whom are lesbians, including the odd inquisitor I don’t always know how to talk to. I love it here because it is just the right mix of uncomfortable and wonderful. Wonderful Penny. Bronwyn. Many weird feminists walking in and out. You’d think we would all be miserable, considering why we come here. We are not all friends. It’s not that kind of community.
One weekend, one of the women friends my boyfriend Makanjila and I go clubbing with is pulled into a car on Sea Point Main Road, a few blocks away from our club.
For the next week, everybody in the group tries to convince her to go to Rape Crisis except me. Give her time, I plead. But she needs to go, they argue. I get it. But stop applying pressure. Stop doing all the well-intentioned, wrong things.
None of the many stories of the survivors I counsel, or those of survivor friends, make it to my nightmares. I must be good at compartmentalising. My obsessive fear of being abducted and gang-raped as a teenager has been replaced by this new fear of waking up like the woman in the flat in Gardens. My friend has just been kidnapped and raped while walking on a road I frequent, but the old abduction-gang-rape nightmare fear does not return.
I am only afraid of a man climbing through a window while I sleep in my flat alone. In the house we share, my bedroom window faces the street but my fear is very specific.
I know every single statistic on gender-based violence in SA, so I am well aware of my vulnerability, but I still walk where I want to when I want to.
I know no woman is ever safe, and I may not win, but I will fight with all my might. And I am fighting when I insist on going where I want.
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