3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Surfacing (im)possible victims: the role of gender, sexuality and power in constructing the conditions of possibility for victims of female sex abuse(2015-08-31) Kramer, SherianneFemale sex abuse (FSA) has recently emerged as an object of enquiry in the academy and medico-legal systems both globally and in South Africa. However, the academic research is primarily focused on perpetrators, resulting in very limited information on victims. Victim data that are available are based mainly on studies conducted with perpetrators. FSA victimhood is underexplored and many victims remain invisible to the criminal justice and health systems and are barely discernible as objects of human science knowledge. Despite the accent on vulnerable populations and human rights in the contemporary world, there is very little work on precisely why these victims remain invisible. Accordingly, this research aims to identify the cultural conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instrument-effects of modern power. The study’s objectives were achieved by interviewing persons who selfidentified as FSA victims. A Foucauldian informed discourse analysis was employed to interpret the transcriptions of these interviews and to explore conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as they were constructed in the interview context. The findings illustrate precisely how deeply engrained constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and self-identifying victimhood. Overall, a particular configuration of access to nonnormative psychological, gender and ‘sex’ discourses, mostly mediated by the internet and incited through the confessional context of the interview, provides the possibilities for an identification as a victim of female sex abuse. These points of identification are coordinates for disrupting normative understandings of gender, sexuality and power in sex abuse and thus constitute the beginnings of a counterknowledge on transgressive sexualities. This counter-knowledge will further contribute to critical accounts of the way that power/knowledge produces, reifies and naturalises human subjects through technologies of sexuality.Item Discourse and power in the self-perceptions of incarcerated South African female sexual offenders.(2010-08-10) Kramer, SherianneFemale sexual offenders have recently become the subject of increased medical, legal and public attention. However, the medical and legal systems insist that female sex crimes are rare regardless of the fact that when sexual victimization experiences are surveyed, the incidence of female perpetrated sex crimes is often higher than expected. Additionally, lay discourses concerning female sexual perpetration remain charged with expressions of disbelief and the vast majority of attention on sexual crimes therefore remains focused on male offenders. As a result, female sexual offenders are understood and treated differently to their male counterparts in the media and medico-legal contexts. In light of the continued denial of female sexual perpetration, this research explored how such beliefs around female sexuality shape the self-knowledge of female sexual offenders. By doing so, this investigation aimed to illuminate how disciplinary power acts to produce self-knowledge that, in turn, leads to the discursive coordinates by which female sexual offenders come to define themselves. This was achieved by interviewing female sexual perpetrators and thereafter drawing on critical discourse analysis in order to interpret the transcriptions of these interviews. The results demonstrated that the participants’ subjective experiences as agents and non-agents in the perpetration of sex crimes relied on social constructions of men, women, motherhood, sexuality and religion. All of the offenders constructed themselves as characteristically female- maternal, passive, vulnerable, victimised and innately virtuous. Their responses drew discernibly on rationalising discourse, gendered discourse, inversions of their femaleness, perceptions of the legal and correctional systems, institutionalised discourse, discourse on rehabilitation and expressions of morality and docility. Most of these discursive patterns, as both instruments and effects of power, simultaneously replicate and reproduce broader social discursive practices that imply that women are harmless, nurturing and incapable of female sexual perpetration. The availability of medical, academic and legal discourse on gender and sexuality allowed the participants to draw on victim discourse, histories of abuse and claims of psychological ailments to justify their crimes. These rationalisations also worked in conjunction with gendered discursive strategies that implied that men are aggressive perpetrators whilst women are harmless victims. As such, the perceived responsibility for the participants’ crimes was most often displaced onto their male accomplices. In this way, the participants upheld their subjective innocence as well as assisted in the maintenance of the construction of the female sexual perpetrator as an unfathomable and impossible construct. This was further emphasised by the fact that not a single participant believed she was guilty of a crime. Such a belief is in line with gendered constructions of criminality as a predominantly male activity. As such, the participants’ reproductions of traditional sexual scripts foreclosed alternative understandings of female sexual perpetration. While dominant patriarchal structures utilise discourse as a means to transmit, produce and reinforce power, this study drew on discourse as a means to resist traditional gendered understandings of sexual offending and to create new configurations of knowledge power by offering counter-knowledge of sex crimes. In doing so, academics, policy makers and the general public have access to a different and novel understanding of female sexuality in light of sexual offending. This has practical implications for the acknowledgement and awareness of female sexual perpetration as well as for future preventative efforts.