“I’m here for abusing my wife”: South African men constructing intersectional subjectivities through narratives of their violence

The paper aims to explore the subjectivities men construct in their talk about their own violence toward women partners and the meaning these understandings of their violence have for the intervention programmes they attend. We take an intersectional reading of marginalised men’s narratives of their perpetration of violence against intimate women partners. Drawing on interviews with 26 participants who had been mandated into criminal justice intervention programmes in Cape Town, we attend to how their race, class, gender and location intersect to shape their understanding of their violence. We also analyse the implications that this wide-angle reading of men and their violence has for intervention programmes that mostly have been imported from Euro-American contexts. The paper offers a critique of current intervention practices with domestically violent men that focuses too heavily on gendered power alone. Furthermore, it suggests that an intersectional reading of the multiple realities of men’s lives is important for interventions that aim to end their violence against women, particularly for marginalised men who have little stake in the ‘patriarchal ’dividend’.Keywords: batterer interventions, intersectionality, intimate partner violence, narrative, domestic violenc

Communicating About Sexual Violence on Campus: A University Case Study

South African universities are in the midst of highly visible struggles around decolonisation. Over the past two years, these struggles have  foregrounded racialised, classed, gendered and other forms of exclusion. These are being challenged both by black academic staff as well as by black students. Most visibly and deeply connected, have been the challenges to the ways in which universities, as particular types of institutions, have dealt with sexual violence and harassment of its womxn1 students. In this context we ask how the University of Cape Town, as one particular case study formally communicates about sexual violence on its campus. In an archival analysis of the university’s public communications on sexual violence during 2015 and 2016, we ask what kinds of messages it conveys about violence, victims and perpetrators. We are interested in the ways in which the university positions itself in relation to the issue of sexual violence. The paper finds that the university’s institutional discourse on sexual violence produces and reproduces some of the same discourses on sexual violence in both the public and media more broadly