Unity in Diversity
The public television endeavor in South Africa to translate a multicultural ideology into programming addresses the plurality of citizen-viewers in the country through the stipulation of language and local content quotas, among other corporate objectives. But the way women negotiate television's attempts to reproduce a shared sense of national identity and the manner in which they view television as a means to participate in the national public sphere have not yet been assessed. This chapter intervenes by investigating the heterogeneous manner in which audiences utilize global and local programming in their identification as national subjects. First, white women offer an antagonistic response by distancing themselves from nation-building rhetoric and by expressing preferences for programming from other national contexts. Second, older black women collaborate by identifying with programming on television that they believe addresses issues of the nation directly. And, finally, a mixed racial and ethnic group of women demonstrate more ambivalent or critical responses to programming designed to bring people together around national concerns. The paradoxical responses of women to national programming suggest the exclusive qualities of the lived experience of multiculturalism versus the imagined success of the televised national project. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
South Africa; 
television; 
reception; 
cultural proximity; 
multiple proximities; 
gender; 
race; 
class; 
multiculturalism; 
audience studies; 
globalization
Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa
This article examines the shifts in young men's and women's racial and gendered identities in Manenberg, a predominantly coloured, Afrikaans-speaking township in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how male and female youth destabilizes, renovates and transforms local racial and gendered identities in relation to the local histories, repertoires and ideals of masculinity and femininity and in relation to global cultural forces such as soap operas, rap music and international brand name clothes. Youth obtains access to these global features through electronic media such as television, radio or visits to trendy city nightspots and cosmopolitan beachfront neighbourhoods. This study challenges the idea that cultural flows from the North necessarily lead to cultural hegemonization and homogenization in the South. Instead it suggests that the meanings that these cultural forms assume in this non-western context are shaped by specific local histories and cultural practices.
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