Children, Pathology and Politics:Genealogical Perspectives on the Construction of the Paedophile in South Africa
Date
2006-11-17T10:51:47Z
Authors
Bowman, Brett
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Abstract
Through 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.
Description
Faculty of Humanities
School of Human and Community Development
9505866y
bowmab@unisa.ac.za
Keywords
Genealogy, Paedophile, South African, Sexuality