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white middle class family in their adjustment to the new South African society in transition, and
to represent an active culture creating a new society. With the end of apartheid, many white South
Africans are experiencing an identity crisis represented in the comedy SB, where the ideological
value of owning a home or one’s own business is shown as the value of both a black and a white
family. In the comedy genre an embattled couple sustain confrontation in various situations by
disregarding social propriety. In SB the two families, the Dwyers and the Molois, symbolise the
embattled couple, but comedy assuages the conflict between the characters. The conflict is never
resolved but the moment is frozen, masking the sense of loss associated with compromise, and
ritualising the collective value of the characters’ integration into an idealised social unit
(Schatz,1981:155).
Going Up III takes place In the legal offices of Cluver and Associates and revolves around the
activities of Jabulani Cebekulu, a street-wise Zulu office helper and an old-fashioned lawyer,
Reginald Cluver a white colonial-style male. Its multilingual narrative lampoons all aspects of the
new life in South Africa, while the characters in Going Up (III) form an office family. GU III,
being a hybrid genre, uses music and humour to satirise the changes taking place in South African
society, where political power has changed and the “consciousness is [now]reached of solidarity
of interests among all the members of a social class” (Gramsci,1971:182). The corporate interests
in their present and future development have not yet been transcended and become the interests of
all other subordinate groups, so that the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a number
of subgroups has not yet been accomplished (Gramsci,1971:182). The new hegemonic bloc, the
African National Congress is still in the process of achieving hegemony in civil society through
ideological means. A total of three episodes from SB and two episodes from GU III were shown
to the participants who then answered questions about their comprehension of the sitcoms.
Perceptions of Power and Identity
Post-structuralist writings in feminism have been interested in the unmasking of power inherent in
claims to knowledge and truth (Giroux,1991:5). This applies particularly in relation to racism
within feminism where power is something identified within particular ways of being, seeing and
speaking (Yates,1993:169). This paper also investigates how the power relations in the societal
arrangements and cultural concepts perceived by the groups are revealed by the oppositions and
silences set up by their discourses. The terms of the framework concerning gender and race in the
language of feminist politics is transformed and contained when it is made policy or law, but
Convention