#EndRapeCulture Campaign in South Africa: Resisting Sexual Violence Through Protest and the Politics of Experience

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the #EndRapeCulture campaign in South Africa, where women students took to the streets in 2016 to protest against the pervasive normalisation of sexual violence on university campuses. In many cases, some participated topless and brandished sjamboks (whips) to show their resentment and anger at the prevailing conditions of sexual violence. The article looks at the role of digital media in circulating slogans around the campaign and asks the question whether these protests can be compared with SlutWalks or FEMEN. Another way of understanding the #EndRapeCulture campaign is to think through the implications of using experience as a form of identity politics.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Theory Workshop at Northwestern University, Chicago and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 http://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/anti-rape-activist-students-banned-rhodes-university-life/, accessed 13 December 2017.

2 Notes from the interactions at a seminar in the SARChi seminar series (2016), organised by the author, during the seminar given by Panashe Chigumadzi, a radical intersectional African feminist and MA student at Wits University at the time.

3 The statistics of the South African Police Services for 2015–2016 was 41,503 reported rapes (South African Police Services Annual Crime Report (2015/2016). There is a huge under reporting (see also Jewkes and Abrahams 2002)).

4 Students stayed in touch with different campuses through WhatsApp and Twitter.

5 This term should be read in relation to Sara Ahmed's theories on the feminist killjoy – see e.g. Ahmed (2017). The term first appeared on her blog ‘Feministkilljoys’. The concept refers to women who through their feminism takes the joy out of life.

6 The recent #Metoo campaign was instrumental in exposing sexual predators in the film and other industries.

7 Sutton (2007, 142–143) argues that this interpretation of protest is embodied in the word nakedness, while the Western capitalist portrayal of women's objectification for men's sexual desires would rely on the word nudity (such as FEMEN).

8 See e.g. the following online articles: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2016-03-16-black-pain-led-me-to-throw-rhodes-poo/; http://www.forharriet.com/2015/04/rhodes-must-fall-end-of-negotiating.html (accessed 3 December 2017).

9 See Gouws (2017).

10 Third World is the concept used by Mohanty.

11 The work of African and Latina feminists have been pathbreaking in post-colonial feminist literature and the work of Audre Lorde Chandra Mohanty referred to in this article, as well as others such as Gloria Anzaldua justifies a separate discussion for which there is no space here. It needs to inform another article.

Additional information

Funding

The author is the SARChi Chair in Gender Politics at Stellenbosch University. She acknowledged the NRF for funding for the Chair.