Academic Wits Research Outputs (All submissions)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/36827
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Item Paedophile as Apartheid event: Genealogical lessons for working with the Apartheid Archive(DOAJ, 2010-03) Bowman, B; Hook, DThe narratives that constitute the beginnings of an apartheid archive do well to illustrate the value of collecting, centralising and analysing everyday accounts of apartheid’s subjects. Developing an archive of narratives that give voice to the quotidian experiences of apartheid is a valuable historical strategy. This approach may be usefully mobilised to offset some of the totalising effects of conventional history writing. Notwithstanding this value, an unreflective turn to narrative as a means to reading the socio-historical and political contours of apartheid, risks reducing critique to a symbolic exercise that centres subjectivity and subject positions as the key analytic targets. Such readings may shift the analysis away from the various levels of materiality and power of which these subject positions are both instruments and effects. In an attempt to demonstrate the way that Foucault’s genealogical maxims may be used to counter the danger of centring the subject in history writing, we present some of the key analytic strategies undertaken in a previous study that produced an effective history of the South African paedophile. In so doing, we argue for a re-scoping of the apartheid archive project to include materials required for undertaking histories of the present. This extension would challenge many of the methodological and political constraints implied by limiting the archive to a corpus of memory narratives.Item The Fallible Phallus: A discourse analysis of male sexuality in a South African men’s interest magazine(Psychological Society of South Africa, 2008) Schneider, V; Cockcroft, K; Hook, DThis article presents a discourse analysis of the constructions of male sexuality in the South African publication Men’s Health. The focus of the analysis was a series of monthly featured articles on best sexual practices and behaviour. Since the magazine’s content appears to confront men with, on the one hand, the construction of the ideal, potent phallus, and, on the other hand, the fallibility inherent in attempting to live up to this ideal, the overarching discourse in the texts was termed the ‘Fallible Phallus’. By stipulating ideal sexual experiences and then juxtaposing these descriptions with the threat of those moments not occurring, a paradox is created in the texts between the phallic dominance of masculinity and the anxieties and insecurities that may result from sexual failure. The Fallible Phallus discourse is a synthesis of four subsidiary themes derived from the texts, namely the male sexual drive theme, the inadequacies of male sexuality, the rule book of sexual practices, and the problematic nature of female sexuality. In the discussion of these themes, it is suggested that the texts use male sexual performance as a yardstick for assessing level of masculinity.