This article explores the multiple symbolic associations of two domestic appliances - the washing machine and the coal stove - in a neighbourhood in Soweto, South Africa, and examines the ways in which these appliances as symbolic objects are integral in the construction and negotiation of women’s ‘proper’ roles and relations. The (in some cases incoherent) multivalence of the appliances sets them up as ideal sites for contestation over the definition of desirable gender roles and identity. An examination of people’s attitudes towards, and actions around, these two appliances is thus revealing of their own notions of gender propriety.
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