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

Abstract

Her research is concerned with racial and spatial in contemporary South African media culture, a particular 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 reflect the fluidity and variability of contemporary norms of gender and family among black South Africans.