3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Exploring homophobic practices and acceptance of gay players among male basketball players in Johannesburg(2023) Ramatsoga, NompumeleloIn post-apartheid South Africa, sport has been positioned as a vehicle for social cohesion. This study investigated if this theory extends to issues of sexuality. It examines the experiences of players within the Johannesburg basketball environment to investigate the acceptance of gay players and the current attitudes towards homophobia. Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is used as a theoretical framework and semi-structured individual interviews were used as the method of data collection. The study involved 10 active players of various ages above 18 years and a range of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Thematic data analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings of the study revealed that the Johannesburg basketball environment is one that subscribes to the principles of hegemonic masculinity and that forms of alternative masculinities are associated with gayness.Item Brides, really fake virgins, Caster, 'Kwezi", The blade runner and 100% Zulu boy : reading the sexuality of post/apartheid cultural politics.(2014-09-05) Robillard, Benita deThis thesis throws into relief the nomadic meshings of sexualities with post/apartheid cultural politics. It explores how, why and with what effects sexualities and post/apartheid nationhood have been imbricated in signal events and phenomena. Terms used to construct the thesis’ title each allude to significant events and processes through which assemblages of nationhood, sexualities, gender and race are worked on/with in particular ways. I propose that these events form a prism through which we are able to see refracted how a race-‐gender-‐sexuality complex becomes a pivotal mechanism through which post/apartheid subjectivities, embodiments, nationhood and sovereignty are being constructed and contested. I conclude that the events under discussion index how sexuality is both a site of political contestation; and, a central and crucial component of post/apartheid nationhood. That it is a ‘machinic assemblage’, which conditions and constitutes a particular field of the political including a popular consciousness of the post/apartheid body politic and sovereignty. Presenting qualitative analysis that reflects on the rhetorical structures evident within the nationscapes under discussion, I analyse and make reference to a substantial sample of media representations of, and discourses about, each of the scenes evaluated across the thesis. To this end, I focalise what Lauren Berlant has termed, the ‘National Symbolic’; an imaginary, chimerical and affect-‐laden screen projection through which citizens venture to ‘grasp the nation in its totality’. This interdisciplinary project both draws on and expands the South African, Feminist and Queer Studies Fields and is influenced by what Judith Butler calls the ‘New Gender Politics’. I achieve this by bringing diverse critical perspectives into a discursive exchange with emerging bodies of scholarship concerned with questions of gender, sexualities, dis/ability and race in the South African context. I introduce novel, or previously untapped, theoretical repertoires to pursue unexplored interpretive horizons that generate new discourses about post/apartheid sexuality and politics. In doing so, I analyse a range of topics including: the state’s management of contemporary virginity practices and its abstinence messaging; popular anti-‐polygamy discourse; and, critical intersex and dis/ability politics, which the available scholarship has not addressed. Although President Jacob Zuma is not the subject of this inquiry, each chapter examines events and developments that are both explicitly, and more implicitly, associated with his presidency. These events have unfolded during a later period of the post/apartheid dispensation; sometimes called the post post/apartheid period. I have written about a time that marked a conservative twist in the transition, which is not imagined as a teleological process. This is a perplexing time of uneven shifts where old things seem to be hardening even as they are simultaneously thinning or leaking away while new things are emerging in unpredictable rhythms and forms.Item Male ballet dancers' gender identity construction : sexuality and body.(2012-09-03) Reeves, Megan MoyaMale ballet dancers are often constructed as being feminine or homosexual (Bailey & Obershneider, 1997; Phillips, 2008), attributes that do not conform to the broader social ideas of what it means to be a masculine male in South Africa. Therefore, the space occupied by male ballet dancers in South Africa is one that contradicts the patriarchal ideas of masculinity and provides further insights into constructions of masculinity that do not conform to essentialist understandings. Therefore, the aim of this research report was to investigate the ways in which male ballet dancers construct their gender identities, sexualities and bodies within this contradictory space. A purposeful sample of four classically trained male ballet dancers over the age of 18 from Johannesburg, South Africa, was invited to participate in the study by means of snowball sampling. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and were examined using narrative analysis. It was found that male ballet dancers construct their gender identities through their bodies by virtue of their performances. They believe that by linking ballet to other masculine activities, such as sport, they can better negotiate their gender identities in a context where their profession is viewed as inferior, feminine and homosexual. The findings of this research have contributed to a better understanding of gender in an alternative domain, where the ways in which male ballet dancers construct their gender identities are challenged.Item Children, Pathology and Politics:Genealogical Perspectives on the Construction of the Paedophile in South Africa(2006-11-17T10:51:47Z) Bowman, BrettThrough an analysis informed by the genealogical method as derived from Foucault (1980a), this study examines the discourses and material conditions that have produced the South African paedophile. Archival texts and contemporary discursive matter are critically analysed against the backdrop of the material conditions of political possibility with which they intersected to construct the paedophile of the South African present. The study traces constructions of the paedophile as a relatively innocuous nuisance in a selected sequence of past historical periods through to the recidivism, sexual malice and aggression that define its contemporary characterisations. In South Africa, practices such as surveillance and disciplines the likes of demography and psychology became integral to the effective management and regulation of a distinctly racialised population. It was precisely through these forms of apartheid governance and power that the conditions for the emergence of the paedophile in South Africa were produced. This early paedophilia threatened the future purity of South African whiteness and therefore the integrity of the apartheid state. The racialised constructions of sexuality of the time precluded the assimilation of blackness into the discursive matrix of paedophiliac desire. The impending collapse of apartheid signalled the reconstitution of black children. While apartheid constructed black children as posing a fundamental threat to white hegemony, 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. Paedophilia however, remained a powerful component of this burgeoning discourse. Locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, in turn produced the material conditions for an everexpanding net of paedophiliac suspicion. This new biopolitical dispensation affixes the paedophiliac crime to all in its scope, such that the symptomatic desire of the once peripherally pathological paedophile can now be insinuated into the fantasies and practices of all of the citizens of a recently “liberated” and democratic South Africa.