Muholi,Z. 2004, ‘Aftermath’. (Appendix 1) |
The following article is a guest
post by Fadi Baghdadi (contactable: here) , a PhD candidate at The University of Sydney’s Department
of Sociology and Social Policy. Baghdadi’s
honours thesis explored the meanings Muslims women attribute to Islamic dress
and Islamic gender relations in an Australian context. His current research is
concerned with exploring how Lebanese Migrants have been effected by and negotiate space-time in regional Australia. The article bellow is an analysis of the social imaginaries that collide in the practice of 'corrective' rape in South Africa and related issues of symbolic power and violence.
Symbolic violence and power coincide within the evolving structures of
social imaginaries. This paper will explore various incidences of ‘corrective’ rape
in post-apartheid South Africa. The manifestation of violence that is enacted will
be shown to embody symbolic power in a homophobic form. The misappropriation of
symbolic power will be investigated in order to explore how it acts to both
police and protect current social orders. These orders will be shown to
incorporate the imaginaries that encapsulate ideas of race, gender and
sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa. The deviance from the path these
orders set will be understood in terms of their connection to the colonial past
of South Africa and the current identity it propagates. Variance in the forms
of rape, specifically its location in a public space and the collective nature
of gang rape, will be examined. Furthermore, the classification of corrective
rape as an abject form of violence will be shown to have merit. This
theoretical framework will be further utilised to elucidate a photographic
interpretation of the consequent trauma. Concurrently, this trauma facilitates
the construction of a new social imaginary. The subsequent clash of imaginaries
that proceeds will be explored. Thus, the nexus that exists between imaginaries
will be understood within the misappropriation of symbolic power that
ensues.
Sexual identities within South
Africa have transformed within the imaginary of the national identity. South
African national identity harbours the hopes and aspirations of its
constituents through the collective imaginary it produces. With the inauguration
of the ANC led government of South Africa, a new identity was shaped and new
imaginary created (Gunkel 2010). South Africa was one of the first countries to
recognise GLBT rights, with their incorporation into the post-apartheid bill of
rights in 1996 (Mkhize et. al 2010). However, the larger struggle faced by
native Africans against their colonial transgressors, overawed the attempted
construction of a local imaginary that included GLBT people. Race and a colonial
past, was utilised by African leaders to both legitimise their homophobic
standpoint and validate their own heterosexuality (Budryte 2009). Zimbabwean
president Robert Mugabe described homosexuality as an, “abomination, a rottenness of culture, imposed upon Africans by Britain’s
gay government” (Epprecht 2004 pp. 45).
References to Mugabe’s remarks that link an anti-homosexual position, to
the politics of decolonialisation, are visible within popular culture in post-apartheid
South Africa (Horn 2006). Homosexuality became regarded as a white exploitation
of black culture and as yet another form of cultural imperialism (Holmes 1995).
This description leads to homosexuality, specifically lesbianism in this
instance, to be labelled as Un-African. The proliferation and popularity of
these ideas into society leads to an unequal distribution of the symbolic power
that is used to ‘correct’ lesbians into their African moulds. They also are
forced to conform to the imaginaries of a patriarchal subservient society,
which subjugates their chance of upward social mobility (Hage 1994: 1998: 2003).
Subjugation is proliferated within the unequal distribution of societal hope,
which is the product of symbolic power (Hage 2003). Furthermore, the incapacity
of the national identity, to incorporate lesbians within its imaginary, is a
form of symbolic violence in itself (Hage 1994). Displacement within their own community’s
imaginary, leaves Black lesbians of South Africa disenchanted within their own
imaginaries. That is a dual attack is perpetuated onto their self, through the legitimation
of heterosexuality as a symbol of post-colonial Africa and their homosexuality
becoming the embodiment of the legacy of colonialism. Thus, through its
exclusion of lesbians within its construction of a national identity, the creation
of a collective imaginary in post-apartheid South Africa becomes a form of
symbolic violence.
The term ‘corrective’ when referring to the rape of lesbians in post-apartheid
South Africa is validated through the experiences of the women. Kekeletso Khena, classified her rape as ‘corrective’,
referring to her experience as when, “where men try to turn you into a real African
woman" (Mufweba 2003). Kekelesto extrapolates
on this description with the justification of her rape by her uncle, “as her having to be taught how to be a
black woman” (Mufweba 2003). The notions of a black woman’s identity,
coalescing with her sexuality becomes clear in this experience of rape. Her divergence
from the collective imaginary is believed to be ‘corrected’ by the imposition
of a heterosexual experience. Sexuality, within the apartheid project, was the bio-political
interface between the individual body and the population body, and for this
reason it became the main target of power (Abdur-Rahman 2006). As Foucault (1987) argued, ‘sexuality is the primary
target of power’. The control of this power coincides with the disposition of
sexuality. Therefore, the domination and forced heterosexual experience placed
upon the victim, becomes the solidification of the perpetrators own identity
(Foucault 1987). Kekeletso’s uncle exploits the power bestowed on him by his
conformity to the African imaginary (Mufweba 2003). This exploitation manifests
in the form of the corrective rape that ensues. In contrast, the violation of
Kekeletso’s imaginary forces her to classify herself as the iniquitous (Mufweba
2003). Her iniquity is personified with her failure to conform to the imaginary
of a ‘real’ African woman. She becomes dispossessed of the power associated
with her people’s attainment of equality. Disinheritance of this power thus
becomes the tool used to validate her rape as corrective, both to her ‘self’
and her uncle’s perception of a black post-apartheid South African woman.
The homophobic identification of
homosexuality as ‘Un-African’ conceals a moral and sex panic. Utilising ideas
of homosociality and Kinsey’s (1948) ideas of the double fear inherit in
heterosexuality, the impetus of this violence can be realised (Reddy 2007). Homosociality
refers to the “social bonds between
persons of the same sex” (Sedgwick 1985, pp. 1). Male homosocial structures
enforce gender inequality, with the reinforcement of masculinity coinciding
with male dominance over females (Sedgwick 1985: De Lauretis 1991: Maddison
2000: Storrs 2003). Women are excluded from these structures and thus become
emancipated subjects. However, while operating outside the protection of these imaginaries,
women become the object of desire for those within (Sedgwick 1985). Lesbianism,
as an imaginary, refuses this desire and becomes a symbol of rejection. Its
construction faces a struggle to find its own place within the imaginaries
created by the homosocialities of both women and men. Lesbian women’s failure to conform to their
sex’s homosocial imaginary leads them to become a symbol of Kinsley’s (1948)
double fear (Reddy 2007). That is, the homophobia derived from homosociality,
becomes a fear of the unknown ‘other’ and the fear of oneself becoming
connected to that other. Therefore, the symbolic violence that perpetuates from
homophobia, acts as the conduit for the appropriation of the power derived by belonging
and conforming to a specific homosocialities imaginary. It has the characteristic
of being an expiation, in which the cleansing of the ‘other’ becomes that which
needs to be corrected. Corrective rape
becomes the tool to control, harass and police this other (Gunkel 2010). It is
the manifestation of the power harboured within homosocial imaginaries, which
is propagated through the acts of violence on its dissidents.
Corrective rape develops as an abject form of violence with its existence
in a place outside the victims imaginary. Abjection is constructed through the
disturbance of one’s identity, system or order. Kristeva (1982) describes the
abject as having, “only one quality of an
object that can be given a meaning – that of being opposed to I” (pp. 1). This
definition encapsulates the inability for a victim of corrective rape to
understand what has befallen them. They have been violated by an ‘other‘, who
exists outside their imaginary. Namely, sexual intercourse with a male is not
part of their identity and something so foreign to their ‘self’, that within
their reality it becomes a ‘non-object’. This disassociation from a known
reality engenders the classification of corrective rape as an abject form of
violence. It causes the victims to reconstruct their known realities, as to incorporate
this violation of their self. Forceful
remodelling of a known reality occurs through the misappropriation of power.
Namely, the power the perpetrators derive from controlling and identifying the ‘abject’
as an object of their own reality. This perception breeds the domination of the
victim both physically, through the physical boundaries of the body the act of
rape violates, and psychologically, through the muddling of the victims
reality. The former, is only the symbol for the latter. The physical boundaries
that have been transgressed become difficult to be understood subjectively by
the victim (Kristeva 1982). The failure of the ‘self’ to understand its
victimisation subjectively becomes a form of violence in itself. Only conformance to the dominating heterosexual
imaginary, will allow victims to reduce the disempowerment felt within the misinterpretation
of the violence instilled upon them. However, this leads to a disassociation
from their ‘self’ within their own imaginary. The disenchanted self, corrective
rape creates, demonstrates its allegory to be an abject form of violence
(Kristeva 1982). By muddling the victims own imaginary, the allegory becomes the
embodied misappropriation of power derived from the colonial history of the
South African imaginary.
The trauma
the victims of corrective rape endure act as scars of their disempowerment
within the post-apartheid South African imaginary. “Many lesbians bear the scars of their indifference, and those scars
are often in places where they can’t be seen” (See Appendix 1). This
statement is contained within a caption that accompanies Zanele Muholi’s image
Aftermath (See Appendix 1). Gunkel’s
(2010) describes the photograph Aftermath, which shows the body of a
Black woman from just above the belly button, down to her knees. The woman is
only wearing underpants bearing the label ‘Jockey’, a signifier of her ‘butch’
lesbian identity within the South African landscape. Gunkel (2010) highlights
that the first abnormality which captures the viewers’ attention is the scar on
the thigh of the woman. Initially, this visible scar can be interpreted as
Muholi’s ‘scar of indifference’ that resides in a place than ‘cannot be seen’.
However, this scar is healed and only a physical manifestation of the victims
violence. In the search to find the ‘real’ scar, Gunkel (2010) reveals how the
viewer’s attention is captivated by the woman’s positioning of her hands. Her
hands, at the centre of the picture are clasped over her genitals. With the
symbolic properties of the scar being discarded, the gesture and positioning of
the hands become the central feature of the image. Through the woman’s mere
acceptance of posing naked in front a camera, the gesture of the hands as
implying shyness can also be discarded (Godana 2006: Gunkel 2010). Instead, the
gesture acts as form of protection, of where there once was a breach of the
self’s boundaries. This area of the woman’s body has become fragile and in need
of security from the ‘other’. So while the scar portrays a healed form of
violence, the gesture of the hands implies an ongoing violation of the body
and/or ‘self’. Muholi explains, “She already has a scar from a past
incident, yet received new emotional scars from her rape” (Muholi in Godana
2006, pp. 91). Thus, the woman is not just protecting her physical
boundaries, but the boundaries of her identity, her imaginary. Her hands signal
a need to protect her ‘self’ from a powerful outside ‘other’. This struggle
becomes anthropomorphised within this image. It creates a narrative explaining
how the disempowerment derived from the victim’s rape, acts as an incessant form
of symbolic violence. The tenacious grip this from of violence has on the
imaginary of the victim creates an ongoing connection with their moment of disempowerment.
The transfigured imaginary they are left with, becomes a symbolic copulas,
linking the past to the present, the former powerful ‘other’, to the current
less powerful ‘self’. It becomes the connecting link, between the subject and
predication that the former violence successfully imposed upon their imaginary.
The public spaces in which the collective rape of South African women
occurs, represents the current dominating imaginaries repression of the lesbian
imaginary. In July 2007, Zandile Mpanza was attacked and raped by four men in
Durbana, as a result of her non-compliance with a ban, which stipulates that
women are not allowed to wear trousers in Umlazi’s T-section (Gunkel 2010: Mhlongo
2007). She was stripped naked and forced to walk through the streets. Her
assailants destroyed her home and belongings and she was forced to move out of
her township (Mhlongo 2007). Her non-compliance was a symbol of her sexuality
and the opposition it constituted to the townships imaginary of Black South
African women. The public space in which the incident occurred, demonstrates
the collective imaginary’s need to exert its power over the less powerful and
classify that ‘self’ as a non-member. Ahmed (2004) sees such acts of public
violence as “affectively sticking the
imagined community of men together through the emotion of hate which, as a
consequence, marks this violence as (culturally) legitimate” (pp. 22). This
classifies emotions such as the hate propagated as not just a psychological
state, but that of a social and cultural practice. The repetition of these social
norms is what creates a society's social imaginary, which in its production,
reinstates and protects itself from outside forces that deviate from its
imagined path. Furthermore, it demonstrates the sense of impunity with which
the perpetrators acted. Their use of a public space can be read as a public
performance of their masculinity (Ahmed 2004: Maddison 2000). One which
attempts to both restore the gender regime that accords men a dominant position
within the South African imaginary and which validates their own heterosexuality
within their homosocialities (De Lauretis 1991: Storr 2003). Zandile was not
only targeted for being a woman, but also for existing outside the parameters
of her own homosociality and that of her male aggressors (Mhlongo 2007). The
dominant imaginary of the community enforced its collective symbolic power onto
Zandile, through the tolerance of her public persecution.
The collective rape of South African women is an attempt of men to
solidify their own identities. These identities are appropriated from the
imaginary produced at a national level. The attack on Nykonyana by twenty men
in Khayelitsha in 2006 (Maduna 2007) can be shown to demonstrate that undertaking
the attack as a group, the men did not only discipline the woman’s sexuality,
but they also disciplined one another’s homosociality (Gunkel 2010). Nedelsky
(1998) sees men that partake in such gang rape as those, “whose masculine credentials are under most pressure – those who are
experiencing a crisis in identity of some kind” (pp.164). This disposition
of masculinity can be attributed to the low socio-economic status of the group
that were thought to have carried out the attack (Burgess-Jackson 1996: Groth
& Birnbaum 1979: Maduna 2007: Nedelsky 1998). The lesbian attitude of not
wanting/needing men to fulfil their sexual desires acts as a symbol of men’s inadequacy to fulfil the
South African’s imaginary of a man, as the ‘breadwinner’ of the family (Bennet
2001: Groth & Birnbaum 1979). Thus, the disempowerment of men in one sphere
is sought to be retained within another. This struggle finds it opposition
personified within the challenge the lesbian imaginary produces. It therefore
aims to contend with this opposition, with the rectification of the discordant
aspect of its imaginary. Homophobic violence becomes not only about the
suppression of lesbianism, but also the refortification of masculine
heterosexuality and dominance (Hall et. al 2003). By contributing to the
rectification of the imaginaries norms, the individually disenfranchised man
aims to solidify his place within society. This man finds commiseration within
a group that shares his embitterment towards the emancipated state a low
socio-economic status entails. Their fears of emasculation become amalgamated
within the violence that they directed towards Nykonyana (Maduna 2007). Furthermore,
the agglomeration of this disempowerment within the group, finds its collective
manumission from the shackles that a low socio-economic status creates. This
enfranchisement is what causes men to concentrate their power and project it
onto women in the act of collective rape (Burgess-Jackson 1996: Groth &
Birnbaum). In the case of Nykonyana, the men solidified their place within the
national imaginary with a collectivized form of violence and subsequent misuse
of aggrandized power.
The incidents of corrective rape in the South African narrative
encapsulate the violence that ensues from a misappropriation of power within a
nexus of social imaginaries. The violence is the attempt by the perpetrating
imaginaries constituents to both, solidify the existence of their own
imaginaries and enact its borders. The power that is derived from this violence
represents both, the members and non-members of the corresponding imaginaries.
This is exemplified in the ideas of a South African national identity,
conflicting with those of a lesbian imaginary. Lesbians come to exist outside the
collective’s protection and act as a reminder of a repressive colonial past.
Furthermore, the dual justification for their need to be ‘corrected’, is also utilised
within the protection of the homosocialities own imaginary at a local level.
Furthermore, at this level, lesbianism comes to represent a direct challenge to
the male homosociality. It becomes
abject to the perpetrators and their need to rectify this abjection, results in
the subsequent abject form of violence exercised. Corrective rape as an
'abject' form of violence therefore, comes to have a dual setting, in both the
victims’ existence outside the perpetrators imaginary and within the victims’ inability
to understand the violence that cannot be understood. Muholi’s (2004) image anthropomorphised
this nexus with its portrayal of the incessant hidden trauma that results from
this particular manifestation of violence. Furthermore, the public spaces in
which the rapes transpire and their collective nature, symbolises the
dominating imaginaries tolerance of symbolic violence. This tolerance
demonstrates the symbolic power conformance to the dominating imaginary
appropriates to its actors. Concurrently, at a national scale, the
misappropriation of this power transpires through the inability of the national
imaginary to incorporate Lesbianism in its vision of a Black woman of
post-apartheid South Africa.
Written by Fadi Baghdadi.
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2 comments:
This post was cited in a masters thesis: "Violent Anxiety: The erasure of queer blackwomxn in Post-Apartheid South Africa" by Lethabo Mailula.
https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/69894/Mailula_Violent_2019.pdf?sequence=1
This post was cited in a masters thesis: Hockenbroch, Olivia, "Fear, Power, & Teeth" (2019). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 11326.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11326
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