School of Human and Community Development (Journal Articles)
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Browsing School of Human and Community Development (Journal Articles) by Subject "Biopolitics"
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Item Children, pathology and politics: a genealogy of the paedophile in South Africa between 1944 and 2004(South African Journal of Psychology, 2010) Bowman, BrettBy the early 1990s the paedophile as a ‘type’ of child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrator was prioritised for study and intervention by the South African socio-medical sciences and cases of paedophilia featured prominently in the media reporting of the time. Drawing on the genealogical method as derived from Michel Foucault, this study aimed to account for this relatively recent emergence of the paedophile as an object of socio-medical study and social anxiety within the South African archive. Based on an analysis of archival texts against the backdrop of international biopolitics and local conditions of political possibility, the genealogy contends that the early figure of the paedophile was an instrument and effect of apartheid biopolitics. The paedophile was prioritised for research and escalated as social threat in the public imagination as part of the broader apartheid project aimed at protecting white hegemony through the ongoing surveillance of and health interventions directed towards South Africa’s white children. While the apartheid project constructed black children as posing fundamental threats to white supremacy, discourses beginning in the mid-1980s repositioned them as vulnerable victims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse (CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. By locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, the material conditions for an ever-expanding net of sexual surveillance were established. The study thus demonstrates that even the paedophile cannot be effectively researched without considering the historical co-ordinates that so powerfully contoured its emergence as an important object of study and social intervention within South Africa’s highly racialised systems of thought.Item Constructing identities through discourse: Examining the textual representation of prostituted women in post-apartheid South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2021) Landman, Tiaan A.The current study explores the intersectional social identities of four ‘prostituted women’ in post-apartheid South Africa as they are represented through discourse. The socio-cognitive model of critical discourse studies is employed to explore the way in which their social identities are represented through texts. These texts were retrieved from the online blog of a non-profit organisation, Embrace Dignity (2019), which advocates for the rights of women and girls. The texts were written to represent the personal experiences of four black women who identify as ‘prostituted’. This study found, through the engagement with biopolitical and intersectional feminist theory, that conditions which are paramount to a ‘social death’ are often proliferated for the subjects at the intersection of their gender, sex, sexual, and racial identities. Furthermore, these conditions are often concealed through the guise of class. The subjects make meaning of their social identities through a range of experiences, which are facilitated by sociohistorical systems of oppression aimed to disenfranchise feminised and blackened bodies in South Africa. These systems of oppressions are communicated through discourses of Bantu education, unskilled labour, violence, sexual perversion, limited access to services, marginal citizenship, geography, movement, and displacement, as well as a discourse of care, to name a few. The study found that these discourses are fostered and realised through the political project of domination, enforced by white heteropatriarchy that was institutionalised by the apartheid government. The study further indicates how the women who are represented by the texts, have been positioned within contexts that suppress their lives. This study emphasises the importance of exploring the intersectional social identities of black prostituted women in order to appropriately support the women within this community and their voices.