‘Rape is a huge issue in this country’: Discursive constructions of the rape crisis in South Africa

Abstract

This article considers how the issue of rape in South Africa is discursively constructed by women who have not experienced it. Taking a feminist discursive analytic approach to data from 15 semi-structured interviews, the article identifies four interpretative repertoires which the women used in their talk of rape. These are the statistics repertoire, invoking putatively objective rape statistics; crime repertoire, locating rape within a crisis of crime; race repertoire, naming the racial Other as the rapist; and gender repertoire, explaining rape in terms of normal gendered dynamics and practices. The women chiefly deployed the statistics, crime and race repertoires. These repertoires intersected to construct rape as horrifically prevalent in South Africa yet concerning a classed, raced and spatially-distanced ‘Other’. They also elided a focus on the gendered scripts and power relations which South African feminists implicate centrally in what they deem a national rape crisis.

The Lack of a Fully Intersectional Approach to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa

“…In addition, Zuma banked on the wounds and pain caused by ethnic, racial, and cultural divisions of Africans during colonialism, white rule, and Apartheid, to encourage sympathy for his right to be traditionally African instead of as a rapist, significantly improving both his public appearance and the trial results (Waetjen & Maré, 2009). Zuma's reliance upon these traditional culture norms to retain his innocence under the law originate in the historical Zulu cultural ideal, exacerbated by white dominance, that women should be controlled and subservient to men (Dosekun, 2013). His purposeful juxtaposition between the Eurocentric and colonial formation of his race as a perpetrator of rape between his role as a traditional Zulu (and therefore a traditional South African man) and his pride of this identification, refocused the trial away from his behavior of the oppression of women.…”

“…Although the issue of rape is known to the general public as a tremendous issue in the country, most have distorted ideas about the reality of the identities of the perpetrators and their victims. This occurs in the pattern that rape is viewed primarily as a crime and othered (Dosekun, 2013;Jewkes et Abrahams, 2002;Wood & Jewkes 1998;Wood & Jewkes 2001). The archetype of rape as othered refers to the tendency for the assumption that perpetrators of rape are strangers to the victim (Dosekun, 2013).…”

“…Women specifically experience gender-based violence in its multiple forms and poor reproductive health, mainly in reference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However despite the established and factual evidence supporting the fact that women remain subordinate to men in South Africa (eg The Lack of a Fully Intersectional Approach to GBV in South Africa 22 Boonzaier, 2005;Dosekun, 2013;Dworkin, Colvin, Hatcher, & Peacock, 2012;Jaga, Arabandi, Bagraim & Mdlongwa, 2017;Jewkes, & Abrahams, 2002;Kalichman et al, 2005;Shefer et al, 2008), gender-based violence analyses are too often considered in terms of race and class (Meyer et al, 2016). Attention must be given to how gender oppression functions in the nation, as without this, the stagnation of gender-based violence will continue to be slow.…”

Framing the problem of rape in South Africa: Gender, race, class and state histories

“…A tension exists in research on rape in South Africa between the need to contextualize rape historically, and the need to ensure that intersectional analyses are not appropriated towards racist or xenophobic assumptions about rape (Idemudia, 2014). Dosekun's (2007Dosekun's ( , 2013 research with women on their views of rape in South Africa has demonstrated how assumptions of race are deeply entrenched in many South Africans' understanding and fear of rape. Black masculinity is inscribed as being dangerous, patriarchal, out of control, and 'culturally' prone to rape.…”

From Esther to Kwezi

“…Male sexual entitlement and control of women's sexuality is an inherent aspect of the dominant constructions of masculinity, drawing on justificatory narratives of rape. 44 The deeply patriarchal nature of the legal discourse in the Zuma rape trial took on an ahistorical and essentialist nature about African culture that obscured the universalist nature of patriarchy,45 that renders women voiceless on issues of their own sexual agency, desire and pleasure.46…”