Deborah Posel

The scandal of manhood: 'Baby rape' and the politicization of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa

This paper traces the genealogy of sexual violence as a public and political issue in South Africa, from its initial marginalization and minimization during the apartheid era, through to the explosion of anguish and anger which marked the post‐apartheid moment, and most dramatically the years 2001 and 2002. Of particular interest is the question of how and why the problem of sexual violence came to be seen as a scandal of manhood, putting male sexuality under critical public scrutiny. The paper argues that the sudden, intense eruption of public anxiety and argument about sexual violence which marked the post‐apartheid period had relatively little to do with feminist analysis and politics (influential though this has been in some other respects). Rather, the key to understanding this politicization of sexual violence lies with its resonances with wider political and ideological anxieties about the manner of the national subject and the moral community of the countrys fledgling democracy.

‘Getting the nation talking about sex’: reflections on the discursive constitution of sexuality in South Africa since 1994

abstract For a country subjected to many decades of rigid censorship, along with various cultural taboos, discussion and argument on matters of sex and sexuality since 1994 has been remarkable. This article examines how and why this is the case. I look at ‘how sex is put into discourse’ and how this discursive constitution of sexuality has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid order.

The Life of the Corpse: Framing Reflections and Questions

This collection of six articles draws on contributions presented to the international symposium on The Life of the Corpse, convened by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in August 2008. The symposium in turn was the culmination of a thematic study group on the same topic. The intellectual animus for both was an interest in considering the cultural politics of death, from the specific vantage point of the corpse and the challenges in meaning-making and regulation that the dead body presents. In particular, as organisers of these forums, we wanted to foreground what we deemed the dualistic life of the corpse: as a material object, on one hand, and a signifier of wider political, economic, cultural, ideological and theological endeavours, on the other. The moment of death produces a decaying body, an item of waste that requires disposal – simultaneous with an opportunity, sometimes an imperative – to recuperate the meaning of spent life, symbolically effacing the material extinction that death represents. Every society, then, has had to face the question: how to reconcile the quest for a dignified end of human life, with a putrefying piece of flesh indistinguishable from other animals?

Afterword: vigilantism and the burden of rights: reflections on the paradoxes of freedom in post‐apartheid South Africa

Within WISER, interest in this venture has been animated by the research programme on Law, Criminality and the Moral Logics of Everyday Life, which poses a series of questions about the legal and normative dimensions of the democratisation process in South Africa post-1994, and how these compare with other countries which have undergone transitions from authoritarianism. In the South African case, as in many others, the project of political democratisation, coupled with assertions of the newfound moral legitimacy of law, has been accompanied by an escalation in various categories of crime, provoking widespread popular perceptions of a juridico-legal system which is failing dismally to protect its citizenry. This historical conjuncture raises intriguing questions about the powers and meanings of law, the contestations these provoke, and the competing notions of justice, punishment and moral order associated with these conflicts. Whereas in many other countries, the collapse of authoritarian regimes seriously destabilised the juridico-legal system and institutions of state, the institutional fabric and idea of law in South Africa retains a strong purchase. Yet competing notions of social order and justice have proliferated, with complex and ambiguous relationships to the new constitutional democratic hegemony.

DEMOCRACY IN A TIME OF AIDS

In all states, power rests ultimately on the ability to take the life of another. In South Africa, democratization, with its promise of ‘a better life for all’, has been accompanied by an epidemic of AIDS, which has inflicted mass death on the citizens of this democracy. This article urges us to pose questions about the meaning of our democracy – and in particular the democratic right to life, along with the obligations associated with that right – in the light of the experience of AIDS. These questions have a particular urgency in the South African case, but they are pertinent globally, in asking us to think about how the global epidemic of AIDS affects the way we understand the rights and obligations of democratic citizenship.

A CRITICAL HUMANISM

Even at the height of its isolation, South Africa’s political history was inextricably linked to global developments. The struggle against apartheid was always a global struggle, closely associated with the revolutionary ambitions and aspirations of the left all over the world. Apartheid / and in particular Nelson Mandela’s incarceration / became a symbol of global oppression, as much as the liberation struggle became an affirmation of the courage to resist and the dream of a world beyond race. Similarly, the overthrow of the apartheid regime, achieved without the destruction and turbulence of violent revolution, became a global ‘miracle’ / reaffirming the values of humanism, the international project of human rights, and the idea of a politics born of reason, justice, and reconciliation.

Social History and the Wits History Workshop1

This article is a brief reflection on the History Workshop (HW)s intellectual repertoire through the rubric of ‘social history’ – one that is widely associated with the Workshops major innovations and accomplishments, even if it does not exhaustively capture its project and product over thirty years. Writing as an active member of the HW for thirteen years, the article is, in many ways, a tribute to the Workshops intellectual vitality – which enriched my academic life. It is also a friendly challenge to the current HW to grapple more explicitly with the current character and place of social history in its oevre – an undertaking that would prompt a more theoretically reflexive turn than has been the Workshops predilection for much of its past.