Mothers, Cousins, Sisters, Friends: Black South African Relations in Date My Family

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.2.2.0022
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• Pages: 22-36
• Author: Candy Sithole,Nicky Falkof
• Subject Matter: Reality television,family,representation,South Africa, Date My Family

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 2.2 December 2019

Mothers, Cousins, Sisters, Friends

Black South African Relations in Date My Family

Candy Sithole

Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Nicky Falkof

Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Candy Sithole has completed undergraduate, Honours and Masters degrees

in Media Studies at Wits University. She was awarded the university’s

Chouliaraki & Orgad Long Paper Prize for excellence in Research at Honours

Level in 2017 and the Stuart Hall award for outstanding research in a Media

Studies MA in 2019.

Nicky Falkof is a cultural studies scholar based at Wits University in Johannesburg.

She is the author of The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late

Apartheid South Africa (2015), and co-editor of Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives

of a Global South City (forthcoming 2020) and Intimacy & Injury: In the Wake of

#MeToo in India and South Africa (forthcoming 2020). Her research is concerned

with racial and spatial anxieties in contemporary South African media culture,

with a particular focus on Johannesburg.

ABSTRACT

This article explores representations of black South African family structure in

the popular local reality television programme

Date My Family

. Focusing on

visual and verbal discourses, it considers the programme’s cultural relevance,

presentation of social circumstances and understandings of black South African

identity in relation to family structure. Within the world of

Date My Family

,

western/European conceptions of the nuclear family, so often valorised within

reality TV, are renegotiated, and families exhibit the more commonly African

extended form. At the same time gender relations within these families shift

away from apparently traditional modes, with female-headed households and

absent fathers common. The extended families that feature in

Date My Family

reect the uidity and variability of contemporary norms of gender and family

among black South Africans.