School of Literature, Language and Media (ETDs)

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Femicide in South Africa: Ideal Victims, Visible Bodies, and Invisible Perpetrators
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-05) Nyathi, Tebogo; Falkof, Nicky
South Africa’s femicide rate is five times the global average (Statistics South Africa 2018). In recent years, we have seen increased scholarly attention examining media reporting of femicide. These studies have been critical the way South African media have and continue to cover femicide. This study seeks to add to this existing knowledge by exploring the media coverage of three sexual violence murders. This study explores the online news media coverage of three case studies. These case studies are the rape and murder of University of Cape Town student Uyinene Mrwetyana, the rape and murder of Lynette Volschenk, and the rape and murder of grade 7 pupil Janika Mallo. All these murders happened in Cape Town in August 2019 and received prominent media coverage. This study utilizes thematic analytic tools to explore dominant patterns in the data through the framework of representation and intersectionality. The study aims to do a close reading and identify discourses embedded in news media texts to highlight their functions, effects, and social and ideological implications for society. The findings reveal an increased focus on the visible bodily injuries of victims and media used spectacular language to present this. The focus on the bodily injuries resulted in making perpetrators invisible. The analysis confirmed that certain victims matter to media more than others. Furthermore, media represented femicide as a current crisis and ignored the historical structures that enable the prevalence of sexual violence. Although, this study is not comparative media analysis and does not provide media to show that some murders are under reported, because it is only looking at three cases the analysis does demonstrate that other murders matter more than others. The study concludes that the way media cover femicide does not present the ‘true reality’ of sexual violence in South Africa and we are still far from finding long lasting solutions to the rampant violence.
In Search of Utopia: Sylvia Pankhurst, Ethel Mannin, Nancy Cunard, and International Socialist Woman Authors in Interwar Britain
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Timlin, Carrie; Kostelac, Sofia; Gordon, Colette
A revival of anti-communist discourse in scholarship and politics has reignited decades-long debates between those who associate communism with the atrocities of totalitarian systems, and those who seek to emphasise the work of Socialists who genuinely sought to create a world free from gender, class and racial discrimination. In literary studies this has manifested as renewed interested in the lives and work of utopian Socialist authors like Nancy Cunard, Ethel Mannin and Sylvia Pankhurst, which suggests a shift in scholarship towards those outside the literary canon. Pankhurst and Mannin drew on literary forms that spoke to the culture, history, and experiences of their readers: women and the working classes. An exploration of the complexity of Cunard’s journey from attempts to infiltrate elitist literary circles, to a poet whose work captured the hardships of racial inequality and war, challenges ideas about the politics of modernist experimentation, and the value placed on high art. Taken together, their fiction and non-fiction unsettles the boundaries between art and activism, high, middle and lowbrow art, and preconceived ideas about the canon in the study of literature. Bringing their fiction and non-fiction into conversation with their socio-political contexts, readerships, and the philosophies and utopian socialist doctrine that shaped them as author-activists opens new avenues of exploration into the interplay of politics and aesthetics. Blurring the line between public politics, fiction and non-fiction, Pankhurst, Mannin, and Cunard’s work was a crucial and effective part of their internationalism, socialist activism, and resistance to totalitarianism. In the tradition of the utopianism of the late 19th Century they adapted literary forms as vehicles for socialist philosophy and doctrine. In addition to their creative work, they used literary techniques to shape non-fiction like newspaper articles, pamphlets and other political texts. The diversity of experience that Pankhurst, Mannin and Cunard recorded in their fiction and non-fiction amounts to an archive of work that complicates reductionist post-Cold War debates about the theory and practice of communism.
She’s Not a Bad Girl, Brenda Fassie: Past, Present and Future, A Canon for the Construction of Post Colonial Feminist Consciousness
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Qwesha, Qhama; Mupotsa, Danai S.
In this research report, I examine the ways that icon Brenda Fassie operates as an important archive for the articulation of quotidian feminist consciousness. In paying close attention to the present re-emergence of Fassie in South African intimate publics that include idioms, modes, praxes, aesthetics, and consumptive forms that she currently figuratively circulates. I approach the question of an archive from two central sensibilities: first, with regards to authoritative narrative accounts related to her memorialization; and second, in the ways that her figure (re)appears in these intimate publics to reconfigure the meanings we attach to African femme/womanhood and sexualities. Looking to multiple archives is a methodological gesture at assembling a range of cultural objects that include her body of work, including the aural, visual, and aesthetic performance of her work; along with the archive of work produced with or about her that often situates itself around accounts of her biography. With this understanding of her archive, the approach is to see how Fassie figuratively operates, presenting contesting identities through which she can move in and out of multiple temporalities that are often contradictory. Fassie’s ability to transgress while equally forming a part of national historic discourse allows us to inquire into the ways that she complicates notions of gender and sexuality – and how these continue to shape current articulations of feminism in post-apartheid South Africa.
Using mixed-method approaches to provide new insights into media coverage of femicide
(2019) Brodie, Nechama R.
South Africa has a femicide rate that is six times the world average. Over 2,500 women aged 14 years or older are murdered every year, the majority of these women killed by an intimate partner. Despite the prevalence of femicide, less than 20% of these murders are ever reported in South African news media. Studies on news-media coverage of femicide reveal a subjective and obscure process of media selection and exclusion, which contribute to an archive of crime reporting that is not reflective of actual crime rates and which actively distort the nature and frequency of certain types of crime. This influences public perceptions and fear of violent crime, including notions of who is a suspect and who is most at risk. This study uses mixed-method approaches to document and analyse the content and extent of commercial news media coverage of femicides that took place in South Africa during the 2012/2013 crime reporting year, through an original media database listing 408 femicide victims associated with 5,778 press articles. Victim and incident information is compared with epidemiological and statistical data, including mortuary-based studies and police crime statistics. Media data is explored through various media effects models, including a mixedmethods framing analysis, and is also examined by title, and by language. These analyses reveal how media constructs and depicts particular notions of gender, violence, race, and crime in South Africa.
Vera Duarte and Paulina Chiziane: The Notion of Womanhood and Post-Colonialism
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-05) de Oliveira, Monica Ester Monteiro Batista; Campos, Marta
This dissertation intends to present a comparison of the notion of womanhood in the post-colonial context presented by Paulina Chiziane’s novels, namely Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (2012) and Ventos do Apocalipse (2003) and Vera Duarte’s novels (poetry anthologies) De Risos e Lágrimas (2018) and A Reinvenção do Mar (2018). This research will be done by conducting a comparative study on the works of the African writers Vera Duarte and Paulina Chiziane, using thematic and narrative analysis. This dissertation will contribute to and complement existing research related to both authors and both countries. However, this study is novel in that it compares the works of two female Lusophone writers, from two different Lusophone countries and compares two different styles of literature, poetry and novel.

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Browsing School of Literature, Language and Media (ETDs) by SDG "SDG-5: Gender equality"

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