This book offers a critical feminist perspective on the widely debated topic of transitional justice and forgiveness. Louise Du Toit examines the phenomenon of rape with a feminist philosophical discourse concerning women’s or ‘feminine’ subjectivity and selfhood. She demonstrates how the hierarchical dichotomy of male active versus female passive sexuality – which obscures the true nature of rape – is embedded in the dominant western symbolic frame. Through a Hegelian and phenomenological reading of first-person accounts by rape victims, she excavates (...) an understanding of rape that also starts to open up a way out of the denial and destruction of female sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes (...) and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nat... (shrink)

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in (...) Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive. (shrink)

This paper explores how we could approach the decolonising of the debate on sexual violence within the South African post-colony. For this purpose, a historical event is analysed: two presbytery hearings of 1843 and 1845, both involving Xhosa convert John Beck Balfour, at the Scottish mission station of Burnshill based in Xhosaland (later called British Caffraria). The hearings involve (extra-)marital and sexual behaviour. Walter Mignolo’s notions of border thinking and colonial difference, further complicated with the idea of colonial-sexual differentiation, are (...) employed to show aspects of what is at stake in a decolonising reading of Xhosa convert sexual behaviour. (shrink)

A case has been made by various authors that the normative and processual notion of personhood found in African philosophy is discriminatory: it has been labelled as sexist, ableist and anti-queer. Within the anti-queer critique, one area that has not been specifically addressed in the literature is whether this notion of personhood is biased against people who identify as non-binary with respect to gender. This includes people who are gender fluid and gender neutral, among others. In this article, we argue (...) that the binary conception of gender is deeply connected to a colonial agenda, and does not accurately fit extra-colonial gender conceptions. Through an analysis of extra-colonial language and logic, read together with the flexibility inherent in the processual notion of personhood (on our reading), we argue that binaries do not sit comfortably with extra-colonial African thinking, and as such, processual and normative personhood can be understood in a way that embraces non-binary individuals. Further, the standards for achieving personhood are set by and achieved within the community, so a community which recognises and celebrates non-binary individuals can set up a framework for them to achieve personhood. Accordingly, normative personhood in African thought is found not to exclude those of non-binary gender. This reading saves the normative approach from some of the critiques levelled against it, as well as: i) enhancing consistency in an African world view; ii) strengthening the decolonial agenda; and iii) showing normative personhood to be fairer and more inclusive. (shrink)

We argue that the problem of violence persists, to a certain degree, because of our refusal or inability to think about traumatic, difficult or “senseless” material systematically. We explore the connection between thinking and violence, and specifically Arendt’s question whether thinking can make men abstain from violence. We are interested in the relationship and tension between knowing and not knowing – as products of thinking – in relation to (also our own capacities for) violence. The tension presents in two main (...) ways. First, thinking is employed to shed light on dark or difficult knowable material, thereby increasing our understanding of ourselves, our place in a troubled society and our relation to violence. Second, thinking bumps up against our ability to know, and it is this unknowability that exposes us to our limits as thinking beings as well as a place of humility and mutual vulnerability. We suggest that paying closer and more nuanced attention to the gender dimensions of the above questions reveals something important about the reasons that gender-based violence persists. We argue, with Arendt, that violence results from non-mastery and that the equation of male power with violence is a lie that violence perpetuates about itself. Similarly, Heberle argues that violence results from the fragile non-cohesiveness of masculine subjectivity and thus also traces the roots of violence to weakness and fragility rather than strength or power. We argue that the antidote for this false mastery and control is thinking. (shrink)

When I arrived in Paris in 1977 to study with the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, the first question he asked everyone in his seminar was: d'où parlez-vous? Where do you speak from?From where do you speak? Without a final or fixed reply, this fundamental question occupies a central place in Paul Ricoeur's expansive work. It is perhaps one of his more important commonplaces. D'où parlez-vous? The question is a reminder, a provocation to remember that speaking is located—it takes place in a (...) place, and helps to establish and transform that place—and that speaking also incurs responsibility for this power.In May 2018 the meeting of the Society for Ricoeur Studies took place for the first time on the African continent.... (shrink)

Recent rape law reform is most saliently characterised by a turn to gender neutrality in its definition of the crime of rape. The few possible advantages of a gender neutral approach to rape are offset by a series of disadvantages regarding gender justice when viewed from a feminist perspective. Formal gender neutrality does not safeguard against the effective influence of pervasive and enduring symbolic constructions pertaining to male and female sexuality and of a normalised hierarchical binary constructed between the two (...) sexes, in particular where sexual relations are concerned. Such efficacy may impede justice for both male and female victims of rape. The question about the place of sexual difference or rather sexual specificity within feminist theories of justice should be considered anew in light of this critical analysis of gender neutrality in rape law. (shrink)

The authors identify a pervasive tendency, especially in the world of development and humanitarian response, to hierarchize or prioritize certain types of victims of sexual violence in armed conflict over others. Within this broader context, they focus on what a considered feminist acknowledgement of male victims of conflict-related sexual violence should look like. On the one hand, they emphasize that one and the same patriarchal template is used to humiliate and shame male and female victims of sexual violence alike. On (...) the other, they urge that in light of the pervasiveness of patriarchal ideology and its harmful and wide-reaching social effects, the time is not yet ripe to endorse a gender-blind approach to CRSV. (shrink)