“Coloured* identity needs a bietjie room to breathe.” This line from Chérise Adams’ Master’s thesis stays with the reader and only crystallises once you grasp the uniqueness and depth of her research for an MA in Visual Studies at Stellenbosch University (SU).

Adams grew up in Cloetesville, a place she says “raised me and runs through everything I create”. In her neighbourhood she watched womxn share food without ceremony, pool childcare and negotiate safety in streets that offered little of it. “What I witnessed at home were feminisms that were not named as such,” she says. “These were complex systems of knowledge, but they were rarely acknowledged as theory.”

Her research set out to hold these forms of feminist practice with the seriousness they deserve. Interviewing five womxn from Stellenbosch and surrounding areas, Adams explored everyday acts of survival, care and resistance through what she terms “ghetto feminism” – inspired by hood feminism, a movement attentive to the needs and knowledge of marginalised womxn.

The resulting thesis examines visual representations and narratives of South African ghetto feminists, reframing feminist thought from the ground up. It is rooted in the Winelands and in the life-worlds of working-class Coloured womxn, insisting that their intellectual labour be recognised as such.

For Adams, the project began with a personal dissonance. “There was a gap between the feminist frameworks I was reading and the worlds I grew up in,” she says. That gap opened into a question that would anchor her research: What counts as feminist work in the Winelands, and why is the labour of working-class womxn so seldom treated as intellectual?

Her unconventional thesis – published as a website she ironically calls an “archive” – embodies this commitment. Written partly in Afrikaaps, with chapter titles like “Ja, neh! Stay wys,” “Deuri tjat, ma ONS wys duime,” and “Jirre, is alwee tjaila tyd,” it refuses the idea that academic legitimacy rests in standard English or in forms that feel distant from lived experience.

Rethinking feminist theory

A pivotal turning point in Adams’ thinking came long before university. As a child she heard the name Ellen Pakkies on the radio – a woman from Lavender Hill who killed her drug-addicted son in 2007. Public opinion was split. So was her community. Adams recalls her mother defending Pakkies with conviction. “She extended empathy to a woman whose life experiences she did not share, and ever since I have been trying to do the same,” she says.

The moment stayed with her because it revealed the complexity of care in communities often portrayed only through suffering. It also challenged her early belief that “there was no feminism in the ghetto”. In Cloetesville and across the Cape Flats, feminist practice is enacted daily. “My community may not speak about the gender pay gap or writing manifestos,” she says. “But they share resources; they try to combat food insecurity even if it is only for one dinner; they make sure a neighbour exits their home safely before work.”

This grounded, communal ethic resonated deeply when she encountered the work of American writer and activist Mikki Kendall. Kendall’s insistence that feminism must be accountable to the material realities of marginalised womxn felt like recognition. “Her critique of mainstream feminism’s tendency to generalise experiences without addressing structural inequality echoed what I had witnessed growing up,” Adams says. Kendall’s framing of “survival feminism” named what Adams had lived: that womxn theorise through practice, and that the knowledge produced in working-class communities is profoundly intellectual even when unnamed.

The five womxn Adams interviewed revealed forms of resilience rarely acknowledged in dominant feminist narratives. She expected stories of hardship; she did not expect the meticulous intentionality beneath their daily decisions. “Their resilience was not accidental,” she notes. “It was deliberate, measured and thought through.”

Most didn’t identify as feminist. Yet their practices – collective care, boundary-setting, accountability, refusal to disappear – aligned firmly with feminist thought. Their work unsettles mainstream assumptions about agency and resistance.

These stories mirrored Adams’ own experience. “Resistance in Cloetesville was never loud or spectacular,” she says. “It was soft, quiet, improvised, but no less profound.” Growing up taught her that community is something practised daily and that survival relies on collective ingenuity.

Language as home and method

Writing partly in Afrikaaps was both political and personal. “These dialects give expression to parts of myself that academic English could not hold space for,” she explains. Afrikaaps allowed texture, humour and emotional nuance to remain intact.

She illustrates the difference. In academic English, she might say: “Your commitment to this process is evident, and I am confident that sustained focus will yield strong results.” In Afrikaaps, it becomes: “Naai waggou, ek wiet da is ’n klomp nwatas in jou omtes, but nou moet djy staan op jou nomme totti einde – dala, niks distractionsi.”

Adams hopes her work will shift how scholars treat knowledge from working-class communities. She wants vernacular, lived and community-based feminisms to be recognised as intellectually rigorous. Equally, she wants the womxn in her study to see their stories reflected with dignity. “That their everyday forms of care, resistance and survival matter.”

In one chapter she subjects herself to the same scrutiny as her interviewees to “showcase solidarity”. She writes that she has lived in ghetto contexts all her life: “I have accessed the same spaces and have been confronted with the same feelings of having to make chaotic decisions and not feeling heard or understood when my survival was dependent on it.”

Outside research, Adams indulges in young/new adult novels, astrology and even medical journals. “I read medical journals for fun,” she laughs. She loves horror movies and is currently obsessed with Breaking Bad, watching “at least three episodes a day”. Her ideal future includes travelling, writing, volunteering and completing a PhD.

Describing herself as “queer, childless and unmarried”, her humour shines through in her acknowledgements. She thanks her “Mammie and Dadda” for “moving mountains with the little you have” and reminds them that they “raised the most spoiled lower-income brat in the Winelands”.

She honours Prof Willemien Froneman, extraordinary associate professor at AVReQ (the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest at SU), as the “supervisor of my dreams” who supported her as both a student and a Coloured woman navigating academia.

But her final thanks go to the five womxn whose knowledge forms the heart of her thesis: “To Winay, Mo, Wilma, Sam and Judie: None of this is possible without you. Thank you for your community! And to all the ghetto feminist out there: Skut gat and dala.”

• “The word ‘Coloured’ in this thesis is used conscientiously, with full awareness of its contentious socio-political and historical associations.” – Chérise Adams in her thesis, “An Artistic Exploration of 'Ghetto Feminism': How Multiple Voices Contribute to the Dala that must be Archived”.

•  Adams’ thesis can be accessed here: https://sites.google.com/view/anartisticexplorationofghettof/home