Moral panic and porn in South Africa: a critical discourse analysis of top TV's application to broadcast adult-content channels

On the 14th March 2013 the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) held a hearing to consider an application by Top TV and their parent company ODM to broadcast three adult-content channels. This application and hearing have again brought the debate surrounding pornography to the fore in South Africa. While research in the field of pornography studies has historically been centred around whether pornography is harmful to women specifically and society in general, the current research aims to move away from this framework and examine issues of subjectivity, discourse, and power within the debate. This will be achieved through the use of moral panic theory, and Foucauldian critical discourse analysis (FCDA) to analyse the transcript of the hearing held at ICASA as well as newspaper reports regarding the hearing and its outcom

Toxic Misogyny and the Limits of Counterspeech

Gender equality, across all the ways that we humans are engendered, is an unrealized ideal of many contemporary Americans. It is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, unless one interprets “men” to include women, which the Framers did not. Although passed by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed to gain the necessary thirty-eight state ratifications, and it has never become law. Thirty-five states initially ratified it between 1972 and 1977, then two more in 2017 and 2018. It remains one state short. These ratifications indicate significant social progress for women, but the progress is uneven, even within states that have supported the ERA. Offering a glimmer of hope, the Senate of Virginia voted to ratify the ERA in February 2019, but the measure was killed in committee by the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. Women remain constitutionally unequal. For anyone concerned with justice, the question is not whether something should be done about the misogynist onslaught girls and women encounter; the question is: What should be done, and who should do it? Supreme Court doctrine may favor counterspeech to tort remedies or criminalization, but to justify this we need a robust conception of what sorts of speech might have the power to counter oppressive speech, who can achieve it, and under what circumstances. In setting policy, we cannot assume a speech encounter between equally powerful adults, each fully free to speak their minds and each with the backing of deep and broad social norms. Where inequality reigns, the odds are not in favor of someone who tries to combat the bad speech of the powerful with the more speech of the vulnerable. This paper explores the mechanisms of counterspeech and the limits of the remedies counterspeech can provide. By understanding the very concept of misogyny and considering some mechanics of the ways language works, we can gain a better picture of the prospect of creating normative change through counterspeech

Decolonial Interstice in Carnaval Montevideano: Murga as Hegemonic Dissent at the Tablado de Barrio

Murga is a popular carnival genre in Montevideo, Uruguay. Carnival in Montevideo lasts 40 days in the summer months of January through March but is different from carnival celebrations in Argentina and Brazil. Carnival performances are competitive and occur in neighborhood stages (tablados de barrio) and private stages (tablados comerciales). A government body judges performances to determine a winning group from each of the five performance genres: Sociedad de Negros y Lubolos, Revista, Humorista, Parodista, and Murga. Murga is a musical and theatrical performance that utilizes satire to convey dissent towards quotidian occurrences of heteronormativity. Numerous communities outside of Montevideo express dissent through satire, but these expressions are usually not part of mainstream culture. In Montevideo, murga’s satirical dissent informs popular culture and identity; what this thesis refers to as hegemonic dissent. From the perspective of Transnational Feminism, and through the methods of critical discourse analysis and ethnography, murga offers its spectators a lesson in critical thinking through its satirical discourse. When complicity with murga leads to visibility of oppressive systems of power, it becomes an interstice that makes oppression visible and open for discussion. Visibility of, and dissent towards, oppressive systems of power may lead to decolonizing the mind. When a group of individuals participate collectively in this exercise at neighborhood stages (tablados de barrio), decolonizing the mind can be a politicized act of hegemonic cultural citizenship that makes sense of the world outside of heteronormativity

Resistance on the Internet: A study of the Singapore Case

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE