In our culture, in our gender: Implications of the culture/gender interface for South African psychotherapists

Abstract

Debates about the relationship between culture and gender, and the potential contradictions involved in simultaneously respecting both multicultural and feminist principles and values, have occupied an important place in theoretical discussion in the social sciences and humanities. This paper examines the relationship between gender and culture from the perspective of the psychotherapeutic encounter in a multicultural society, in this case contemporary South Africa. With the help of illustrative case material involving traumatically bereaved women who became subject to cultural ascriptions of maliciousness or murderousness, and where cultural beliefs potentially jeopardized gender rights, mental health and therapeutic recovery, the article argues that the relationship between gender and culture, viewed from a therapeutic perspective, can be seen to present complex conceptual and ethical challenges for the therapist. In addition, the structural, psychological and discursive positioning of the therapist and client in respect of warrants to speak and to accept or contest cultural constructions is recognized as implicated in particular kinds of therapeutic impasses. Both clinical and political concerns are discussed in order to illustrate the intersections between the intrapsychic and the social, as well as between the personal and the political. Two related lines of theory, that of intersectionality (derived primarily from feminist theory) and of psychoanalytic theory, are proposed and juxtaposed as a productive way of thinking about instances in which the interface between gender and culture presents particular kinds of problems in the consulting room for both clients and therapists. The necessity for a particular kind of critical self, group and cultural awareness is proposed.