Novel: Playing the Part and Mini-dissertation: The Representation of Modern South African Masculinities in K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams

Abstract

In his novel The Quiet Violence of Dreams, well-known South African author K Sello Duiker explores the unrelentingly brutal day-to-day lives of figures marginalised in society for their poverty, race and sexuality. As the protagonist, Tshepo, undergoes a journey of selfdiscovery the encounters he has with men from various social strata contribute not only to his own personal development, but to an underlying thematic concern in the novel as a whole: what does it mean to be a successful, independent, and powerful man in South Africa in the twenty-first century? The key focus of this dissertation relates to contemporary debates on gender roles and equality by examining the rooted beliefs regarding the performance of masculine identities that are established in the novel. The study identifies core characters who each present – through respective first-person narratives – personal views on masculinity from differing South African social backgrounds. These beliefs are directly compared with each other, and fitted into a theoretical framework on gender performativity, to provide a multi-dimensional discussion of how various masculine identities function, come into conflict and ultimately sustain a male-dominant view of successful gender actualisation. In accompaniment to this dissertation, is my own Young Adult novel, Playing the Part, which also, primarily, seeks to explore the navigation of fraught social pressures when it comes to sexual and gender-related self-discovery. The novel achieves this through the firstperson narration of Andy, a seventeen-year-old boy who struggles with the question of “what it takes to be real man”, dealing with familial and peer pressures while confronting the place of homosexuality (in himself and those around him) in the life he is expected to lead. Both the novel and the dissertation components of this Master of Arts submission focus on perceptions of masculinity and how these affect individuals within their social setting.