This article is concerned with the continued salience of the notion of moral panic, an idea that has been both enormously influential in sociological and media research and has come under fire for various flaws. It reviews some of the most common critiques of moral panic, discussing why these are valid and where they fall short, and adds new comments on some weaknesses in the theory. It goes on to argue that the term and the idea of moral panic continue to have value as critical tools, but require updating. Suggested further developments include broadening moral panic to allow for analyses that consider the global south; taking account of the narrative layering that characterises these episodes; considering the intersection of moral panics and digital media; centralising fear and anxiety in moral panic research; considering moral panics as an interdisciplinary framework rather than as a strict model; and invoking a psychoanalytic rhetoric to further explain how moral panics work and what they do.
For many young black South African women, the competitive arena of social media offers access to significant social and cultural capital, which can be invaluable in the unequal context in which they live. In order to succeed in this high stakes environment young women carefully construct the identities and idealised selves that they present on platforms like Instagram. They display a lifestyle of glamorous consumption, showcasing exclusive brands and fashionable items and modifying and modelling themselves to fit a beauty ideal that emphasises youth, light skin, slender bodies and straight hair. As well as these physical features, young women on Instagram are also hyper-aware of the need to appear “authentic”: to have their online lives and selves appear natural, easy and free of artifice in order to further enhance their status as role models to other women. This article draws from in-depth interviews with 10 black South African “micro-celebrities.” It reveals the central role of authenticity in these young women's online performances of self, and considers the contradictory impulses that require them to both “feel” and “appear” real. Within the framework of existing hegemonic structures, these women appear to be exercising their freedom as neoliberal citizens within a post-feminist setting. Despite the promises of freedom, however, this article reveals the way in which their performances of selfhood are powerfully constrained by normative ideas about aspiration and success.
This article discusses the discursive and narrative intersections between two moral panics that appeared in the white South African press in the last years of apartheid: the first around the claimed danger posed by white male homosexuals, the second around the alleged incursion of a criminal cult of white Satanists. This connection was sometimes implicit, when the rhetoric attached to one was repeated with reference to the other, and sometimes explicit, when journalists and moral entrepreneurs conflated the two in public dialogue. Both Satanists and gay white men were characterized as indulging in abnormal practices that were dangerous to the health of the nation, using a long-standing colonial metaphor of sanitation and hygiene. I argue that fears of homosexuality and beliefs in Satanism operated as social control measures for disciplining potentially unruly groups whose sexual or personal practices were not admissible within apartheid’s injunctions on homogenous conformity among whites. The connection between homosexuality and Satanism, like the connection between homosexuality and communism, served to pathologize whites whose disobedient bodies and beliefs were considered treacherous.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the apartheid system was falling apart, white South Africa was gripped by a powerful moral panic that played out, often hysterically, in the newspapers and magazines of the time. This Satanism scare revolved around fears of a largescale conspiracy of evil that mostly involved white youth, and that threatened the spiritual health and even the continued existence of white South Africa. Rape, murder, cannibalism and all manner of atrocities involving virgins, animals and babies were commonly said to be part of Satanist rituals that occurred across the country. Satanists, South Africans were told, were everywhere, and were as great a threat to their nation as communists. This paper uses contemporary press material to examine three isolated yet related incidents within the scare: the Orso murder trial in 1992, when a teenager and her boyfriend claimed satanic possession as the motivation for the murder of her mother; the case of the 'Rietfontein slasher', also in 1992, when a group of white schoolgirls was apparently tormented by a supernatural force; and a single article about the alleged possession of a large number of black students in a school in the Atteridgeville township in 1989. It uses these three episodes to reveal how the Satanism scare was violently racialised, how the possibility of magic was both legally and culturally reserved for whites and how many white South Africans' literal fear of the devil fed into recurrent discursive narratives about black pathology and white responsibility.
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