RSA
Topics: Africa
, Social Theory
, Sexuality
Keywords: south africa, sexual violence, bantustan, blackness, gender
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
Chloé Samala Faux, Columbia
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Abstract
In South Africa and elsewhere, Black women’s’ lives and deaths have historically fallen beyond the purview of “woman’s” explanatory power for it is precisely their availability to injury that constitutes their “structuring into and [their] symbolic effacement in society.”1 In the aftermath of the highly publicized, gruesome rape and killing of 19-year-old University of Cape Town student Uyinene Mrwetyana in 2019, President Ramaphosa declared South Africa “one of the most unsafe places in world for a woman to live.”2 This paper turns ethnographic scrutiny to a temporary, immersive exhibition--born of a collaboration between an NGO and an advertising agency--in a Johannesburg shopping mall entitled “The Republic of Sexual Abuse.” Unfurling as an examination of the relation between the so-called Republic of South Africa and the (postapartheid) Republic of South Africa, this paper investigates the discursive production not only of a “New South Africa,” but also of “femicide,” a phenomenon presumed to have universal application. I turn to the Bantustan--the reserve to which Black South Africans were forcibly relocated and banished from “White South Africa” as an explanatory idiom for the intrusive exteriority of of Black gender3 in contemporary South Africa. Employing the tools of critical Black studies, political economy, psychoanalysis, ,and anthropology, I locate within the spatial and temporal logics of the Bantustan what Michael Taussig calls “the rupture and revenge of signification.”4 I argue that this rupture and revenge of signification continues to structure the place called “South Africa.”
RSA
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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