Friday, June 28, 2013

Corrective Rape of black lesbian women in Post-Apartheid South Africa.


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. 

Sunday, June 9, 2013

'The Medium is the Message'


Marshall Mcluhan on an Australian television program discussing the affect of different forms of communication (television, radio and print) on the structure of human awareness.