ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


Please note: Digitised content is made available at the best possible quality range, taking into consideration file size and the condition of the original item. These restrictions may sometimes affect the quality of the final published item. For queries regarding content of ETD collection please contact IR specialists by email : IR specialists or Tel : 011 717 4652 / 1954

Follow the link below for important information about Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Library Guide about ETD

Browse

Filters

2016 - 201912020 - 20211

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Rens, Simphiwe Emmanuel

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Misogyny and romance entangled: reading gender, sexuality, and Africanness in Afrobeats music videos
    (2021) Rens, Simphiwe Emmanuel
    This thesis explored how the musical genre of Afrobeats portrays gendered lived experiences to its global audiences in music videos. As such, the thesis asked, what messages concerning gender, sexuality and Africanness are prioritised by the main artists in the scene? Additionally, the study concerned itself with the conversational tropes emanating from viewer commentary in relation to the portrayals of gender, sexuality, and Africanness in the most popular Afrobeats music videos. 25 Afrobeats music videos with high viewership figures – as at November 2018, when said music videos were downloaded from YouTube – formed the core corpus of data analysed in this study. A second data corpus of two thousand five hundred (2,500) YouTube viewer comments was constructed by downloading the top 100 most-reacted-on viewer comments from each of the 25 music videos. These data sets were first subjected to a quantitative content analysis of the music videos, as well as an inductive qualitative content analysis of the second data set (YouTube comments) before a rigorous multimodal critical discourse analysis was performed across both data sets to advance this thesis’s arguments. Masculine and feminine performativties, against their diverse African contextual backdrops, are critically examined. Masculine performativities, I argue, are implicated in a ‘misogyrom’ cultural sensibility which fosters gender-relational expressions that are at once implicated in the perpetuation of misogynistic imbalanced gender power relations and notable hyper-romanticism from (heterosexual) men towards women in the analysed music videos. This new concept – which marries the terms ‘misogyny’ and ‘romanticism’ – forms part of one of this thesis’s original analytical contributions to gender studies. I propose this concept to capture a cultural sensibility wherein the sociocultural dominance of men over women is successfully sustained through the masking of heteropatriarchal misogyny and sexism with men’s acts of overt romanticism towards women through lyrics and behaviours appearing to value women as more than mere objects of men’s sexual satisfaction, but romantic partners with value more than that which a dominant, patriarchal male gaze often relegates to just physical appearance. What this does, is it allows this thesis to read feminine performances in these music videos as variously empowered, agentic and self-determining with regard to sexuality and sexual expression. By so doing, this thesis is able to make another significant conceptual contribution to knowledge by theorising these feminine performativities as ‘sexssertive’. This new concept weds the notions of sex/sexuality with the personality trait of assertiveness; to offer a novel way of describing (heterosexual) women’s perceived autonomy/agency in the domains of sexuality and intimate relations. Considering misogyrom-entangled men and sexssertive women in these music videos, an argument is sustained that the featured men implicitly debase women by constructing false senses of sexual assertiveness and empowerment for women in the domains of sexuality and intimate relationships, as mediated in the analysed corpus of music videos. This thesis purports that depictions of sexssertive women in the analysed corpus of music videos are mere sociocultural façades and should not be allowed to derail the feminist plight towards women’s actual (sexual) empowerment across their diverse African contexts in and beyond popular media texts.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Striving towards ‘perfection’?: investigating the consumption of self-help media texts by black South Africans in post-apartheid
    (2016) Rens, Simphiwe Emmanuel
    This research project studies the consumption of ‘self-help’ media texts with respect to black South African audiences. The core objective of this project is to contribute to expanding debates on race, class, identity, and media consumption. Based on in-depth interviews with 10 avid self-help consumers, the paper develops an argument for the role of self-management in race and other social identities. The deployment of the qualitative methodology of a thematic discourse analysis of over seven hours of interview transcripts assists this paper in providing an account of where, when and how self-help media manifests in the lives of the chosen participants. The paper finds that participants are motivated to consume self-help media texts by a need to ‘know’ and ‘understand’ themselves and others in order for these participants to acquire what they express to be an atmosphere of inter-relational harmony. A growth of media texts forming part of a genre related to the practice of therapy in South Africa is owed to what I argue as a deep-rooted culture of ‘reconciliation’ and a preoccupation with emotions which stems from a particularly murky socio-political past still in a constant state of reparation (prevalent in discourses about reconciliation and forgiveness) in the democratic dispensation. As a key inspiration, the once-off yet pertinent process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa has noticeably inspired a genre which supplies its audience with an array of self-help, therapy-inspired media texts thriving on the practice of public confession and testimony (key principles of the TRC). This has paved the way for a culture of ‘treatment’ and ‘remedy’ becoming what this paper refers to as a ‘public affair’. Active participants on these self-help, often therapeutic, media texts on mass media platforms regularly do so at the expense of exposing deeply personal issues to ‘experts’ entrusted to assist with ‘healing’ what are deemed to be problem areas in people’s lives. Referred to by some of the interviewees as ‘brave hearts’, these participants (‘public confessors’) hold a complex position in the minds of the interviewed individuals who, ironically, express admiration and respect to the individuals who publicly testify and confess as they are a valued reference of ‘learning’ but at the same time, an expression of disappointment and shame is bestowed upon these ‘public confessors’ for allowing their argued exploitation by the media. Amidst all this, it is apparent that consumption of self-help media texts have particularly intricate influences on the patterns of self-identity as constructed by the participants of this research project.