An investigation of the Sowetan “enough is enough-take back your dignity” campaign to challenge violence against women and children
- Ndabezitha, Nomthandazo Sibusisiwe Mary-Angel
- Authors: Ndabezitha, Nomthandazo Sibusisiwe Mary-Angel
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/4521 , vital:20685
- Description: This investigation of the Sowetan “Enough is Enough - take back your dignity” campaign to challenge sexual violence explores whether the South African daily newspaper’s sustained anti-rape coverage challenges or reinforces the social order. It locates the Sowetan campaign’s response within two troubling contradictions. First, while South Africa is a democracy with arguably the most liberally progressive constitution in the world, the epidemically high rape statistics indicate that South African women and children inhabit an environment in which they are effectively denied the same freedoms and rights as men. The Sowetan anti-rape campaign responds to this paradox. Second, heightened exposure and coverage in the news media of rape incidents do not seem to correlate directly with a decrease in incidents of sexual violence. My observation of these contradictions leads me to question whether the anti-rape campaign can be socially transformative. Informed by the Foucauldian insights that the meaning of things is not inherent but exists in discourse, which has the power to make itself true, this study investigates what discourses are articulated in the representation of masculinities and femininities. In this regard, my investigation is informed by cultural studies and gender studies theories. Recognising rape as an enactment of a particular type of masculinity makes it clear that rapists are not deviant monsters, but are men embodying a discourse of male sexual entitlement legitimated by the social order. As the campaign coverage largely represents rape in historically black locations such as townships and villages, I argue that rape is an enactment of a particular violent masculinity within a particular socio-economically marginalised postcolonial context. Hence I also use postcolonial studies and gender studies to inform my theory. This qualitative research takes the form of a case study which entails a critical discourse analysis of 19 texts purposively sampled in order to identify whether the campaign challenges or reinforces the social order. I argue that rehearsing the narratives of prevalent rape and horror at this epidemic without addressing the social order of gender inequality that enables rape is inadequate. The findings indicate that the campaign has limited socially transformative potential, as, while it sometimes challenges the discourse of female passivity, it does not go so far as to critically engage with masculinities and questioning how violent ones are produced in the social order.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Ndabezitha, Nomthandazo Sibusisiwe Mary-Angel
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/4521 , vital:20685
- Description: This investigation of the Sowetan “Enough is Enough - take back your dignity” campaign to challenge sexual violence explores whether the South African daily newspaper’s sustained anti-rape coverage challenges or reinforces the social order. It locates the Sowetan campaign’s response within two troubling contradictions. First, while South Africa is a democracy with arguably the most liberally progressive constitution in the world, the epidemically high rape statistics indicate that South African women and children inhabit an environment in which they are effectively denied the same freedoms and rights as men. The Sowetan anti-rape campaign responds to this paradox. Second, heightened exposure and coverage in the news media of rape incidents do not seem to correlate directly with a decrease in incidents of sexual violence. My observation of these contradictions leads me to question whether the anti-rape campaign can be socially transformative. Informed by the Foucauldian insights that the meaning of things is not inherent but exists in discourse, which has the power to make itself true, this study investigates what discourses are articulated in the representation of masculinities and femininities. In this regard, my investigation is informed by cultural studies and gender studies theories. Recognising rape as an enactment of a particular type of masculinity makes it clear that rapists are not deviant monsters, but are men embodying a discourse of male sexual entitlement legitimated by the social order. As the campaign coverage largely represents rape in historically black locations such as townships and villages, I argue that rape is an enactment of a particular violent masculinity within a particular socio-economically marginalised postcolonial context. Hence I also use postcolonial studies and gender studies to inform my theory. This qualitative research takes the form of a case study which entails a critical discourse analysis of 19 texts purposively sampled in order to identify whether the campaign challenges or reinforces the social order. I argue that rehearsing the narratives of prevalent rape and horror at this epidemic without addressing the social order of gender inequality that enables rape is inadequate. The findings indicate that the campaign has limited socially transformative potential, as, while it sometimes challenges the discourse of female passivity, it does not go so far as to critically engage with masculinities and questioning how violent ones are produced in the social order.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Crime and punishment Mzansi style: an exploration of the discursive production of criminality and popular justice in South Africa’s Daily Sun
- Authors: Boshoff, Priscilla A
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Daily Sun (South Africa) , Tabloid newpapers -- South Africa , Crime in mass media , Justice in mass media , Police in mass media , Newpapers -- South Africa , Newpapers -- Objectivity -- South Africa , Women -- Violence against -- South Africa -- Press coverage , Witchcraft -- South Africa -- Press coverage , Police -- South Africa -- Press coverage
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/44419 , vital:25406
- Description: The highly popular South African tabloid the Daily Sun, established post-apartheid in 2002, is known for its sensationalist and controversial reporting of black township life. Read by over five million black working class readers, much of its reporting concerns the crimes experienced by them and their struggles for justice. The extraordinarily high rate of violent crime in township areas for which South Africa became infamous during the 1980s did not decrease as much as hoped after the political transition in 1994 and crime overshadowed the first decades of the new administration, adding to the frustrations generated by the slow pace of social and economic reform. Part of the Daily Sun’s success can be attributed to how, around these linked concerns, it fashions for its readers a particular discursive world, Sunland. It is the phatic relationship that the tabloid maintains between itself and its readers which forms the foundation upon which this textual study rests. In approaching the tabloid’s representations of crime I draw on cultural criminological understandings of crime as culture and the formative relationship in this regard between crime and the media. As a preeminent site of cultural production in contemporary society, the media contribute to the ongoing definition of what constitutes crime, who is criminal and what counts as justice. This constructivist approach is congruent with Foucault’s notions of discourse and the subject, and I argue that the various competing discourses about crime and justice which appear in the paper establish a set of subjectivities with which its readers may identity. The thesis explores the rhetorical and discursive means by which such subject positions are constructed within the ‘grid of intelligibility’ created by the Daily Sun’s reportage, and using the spatial metaphor of the ‘map’ I trace the contours of the Daily Sun’s domain with regard to crime and popular justice. To this end, the approach taken is a qualitative one which draws eclectically on a variety of interpretive methods, including semiotic, narrative and discourse analysis. Using these, I map the relations between People’s Justice, the police, gender relations and witchcraft crimes, four areas chosen from a broad thematic content analysis of the complete set of editions from 2011. I show how these are not discreet but co-constructed areas within the coverage, drawing their meaning mutually from a range of conflictual relationships derived from the conditions of post-apartheid social life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Boshoff, Priscilla A
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Daily Sun (South Africa) , Tabloid newpapers -- South Africa , Crime in mass media , Justice in mass media , Police in mass media , Newpapers -- South Africa , Newpapers -- Objectivity -- South Africa , Women -- Violence against -- South Africa -- Press coverage , Witchcraft -- South Africa -- Press coverage , Police -- South Africa -- Press coverage
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/44419 , vital:25406
- Description: The highly popular South African tabloid the Daily Sun, established post-apartheid in 2002, is known for its sensationalist and controversial reporting of black township life. Read by over five million black working class readers, much of its reporting concerns the crimes experienced by them and their struggles for justice. The extraordinarily high rate of violent crime in township areas for which South Africa became infamous during the 1980s did not decrease as much as hoped after the political transition in 1994 and crime overshadowed the first decades of the new administration, adding to the frustrations generated by the slow pace of social and economic reform. Part of the Daily Sun’s success can be attributed to how, around these linked concerns, it fashions for its readers a particular discursive world, Sunland. It is the phatic relationship that the tabloid maintains between itself and its readers which forms the foundation upon which this textual study rests. In approaching the tabloid’s representations of crime I draw on cultural criminological understandings of crime as culture and the formative relationship in this regard between crime and the media. As a preeminent site of cultural production in contemporary society, the media contribute to the ongoing definition of what constitutes crime, who is criminal and what counts as justice. This constructivist approach is congruent with Foucault’s notions of discourse and the subject, and I argue that the various competing discourses about crime and justice which appear in the paper establish a set of subjectivities with which its readers may identity. The thesis explores the rhetorical and discursive means by which such subject positions are constructed within the ‘grid of intelligibility’ created by the Daily Sun’s reportage, and using the spatial metaphor of the ‘map’ I trace the contours of the Daily Sun’s domain with regard to crime and popular justice. To this end, the approach taken is a qualitative one which draws eclectically on a variety of interpretive methods, including semiotic, narrative and discourse analysis. Using these, I map the relations between People’s Justice, the police, gender relations and witchcraft crimes, four areas chosen from a broad thematic content analysis of the complete set of editions from 2011. I show how these are not discreet but co-constructed areas within the coverage, drawing their meaning mutually from a range of conflictual relationships derived from the conditions of post-apartheid social life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
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