Youth Month: 24 June at 11:00
Presented by:
- Lisa Vetten (PhD Fellow – Wits University - RSA)
- Sandy Africa (Deputy Dean – University of Pretoria – RSA), and
- Ntokozo Mbokazi (Postgraduate – Rhodes University – RSA)
With the democratic dispensation framing the country as a social context that upholds the rights of all, we here consider how this framework might be/or is undercut by the language and public narratives of masculinities.
In this regard, the Webinar takes its cue from Zoe Wicomb’s ([1994]/2018: 95) essay, when she claims, “[unequal] social relations are produced through discursive formations that I investigate using Michel Pêcheux’s theory of the grammatical inscription of ideology”.
To explore the grammatical “inscription of ideology”, this Webinar considers the role of language and/in democracy. In simple terms, the driving question for this Webinar is rooted in the desire to understand how historically patriarchal discourse and language undermines the democratic principles of equality and the inherent dignity of all citizens. This exploration leads us to consider the contemporary discourse(s) around consent, bodily autonomy and the age old feminist question of justice. As a proposition, we test the notion of literature as an aesthetic tool that facilitates the imagination of new possibilities that are not constrained by historical discourses.