It may be argued that the news media in South Africa are some of the most active in the world as reporters were engaged as key allies in the fight against Apartheid and have been integral in the process of becoming free and independent by challenging political oppression and civil inequalities (Du Preez, 2013). However, the visibility of marginalised groups and the hardships they face are often underreported. According to Michael Morris (2017), an independent journalist, the significant economic impact of the LGBTIQ community's buying power, the so-called ‘Pink Rand’ is hardly researched or stated in the media. Conversely, great emphasis is placed on the discrimination against them and the risks that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are confronted with daily. It was these factors that frames the ‘queer’ narrative in this thesis. Stanley Cohen (1972) first proposed the term ‘moral panics’ to explain how groups are identified as a threat to dominant social values and cause deep-seated anxiety, and how the media may amplify this threat by presenting audiences with negative stereotypes.
Disasters and periods of distress are often blamed on these “folk devils as scapegoats” (McRobbie &
Thornton, 1995). Although Cohen was not specifically referring to the LGBTIQ community in 1972, lesbians were – as they still are – ostracised and vilified (Lake, 2014).
The Christian Right movement is looking to Africa for its pro-family politics, which is explicitly homophobic, with people like Pastor Steven Anderson from the US delivering anti-gay rhetoric calling for Africans to “kill gays and lesbians” and to mobilise support for the movement (DW News, 2014: 3).
According to Lake (2014: 77), “South African lesbians are recognised as a vulnerable minority and are victims of 'corrective rape' and other forms of discrimination. South Africa's transition to democracy has been fraught with sexual identity struggles”, including the lack of information about how issues affecting this group are being reported, who write those reports, and what the nature of the narratives is of the reports being created (Du Preez, 2013).
The dearth of research on how online reporting of GBV and LGBTIQ issues (including ‘queercide’), were framed and about who wrote these reports highlights the relevance of the current study. This thesis is that there should be a coalescence of the 1996 South African Constitution − which promises freedom from targeted and violent discrimination for all − and the responsibilities of journalists and civil advocacy groups when lesbians’ rights are considered. The South African legislative landscape thus creates a context wherein online reporting, ideally, is under affirmative obligation to comply with issue
96 reporting and must investigate, talk about and combat ‘queercide’ based on a synthesis of the Constitutional and South Africa’s journalistic standards on news reporting. Such reposts should also include the reader as an active ‘fact checker’ to hold reporters accountable for the ideals espoused by theorists, activists and politicians. If this this corrective commitment is imposed, queer women will be able to exercise their freedom, fully and freely, as promised to them in a post-Apartheid South Africa where victims such as Eudy Simelane and Noxolo Xakeka now have a voice. The following studies were perused and provided understanding of how the media in South Africa cover LGBTIQ issues.
Amy Adamczyk, Chunrye Kim and Lauren Paradis (2015: 198) found “a wealth of information about the extent to which global communities disapprove of homosexuality”. However, their study did not reveal much about the frames through which gay and lesbian couples were viewed in reports. The aim of the study was to better understand the LGBTIQ community as framed in the public press, and they included online reporting to determine how different contexts shaped gay and lesbian discourse. From an analysis of approximately 400 international newspaper articles, the study found that homosexuality was framed differently in the United States of America, Uganda and South Africa. These nations were selected for the study because all three had a high level of religious belief but were at different economic developmental stages. Adamczyk et al. (2015) drew from cultural sociology and sociology of religion and found that the United States of America was more likely to frame homosexuality as a civil rights issue and that it used claim makers and entertainers more readily for awareness campaigns than South Africa and Uganda. In this context it is noteworthy that the media occupy two different but interrelated positions. That is, they have the potential to influence an individual’s as well as collective attitudes, but they can also express the “collective consciousness” of a nation’s values (Edelstein, 1982). This then presents the media as co-existing with constituents in the same cultural system.
Discourse about the morality of homosexuality has changed in the last 50 years, which has in turn reflected a change in global attitudes (Thomas & Olson, 2012). Therefore, because newspapers are sensitive to the shifting values of their readers, the media professional is the instigator of how the LGBTIQ community is framed. A study by Adamczyk et al. (2015) tested the hypothesis that South Africa will be less likely than the United States of America to discuss homosexuality in the context of civil liberties and rights. The study found that, after decades of colonisation, the discourse emerged in many sub-Saharan African countries “that LGBTIQ individuals should be given the same rights and privileges as the West” (Shoko, 2010: 37). The article speculates that one of the reasons for this emulation might be that “some African nations feel bullied to conform or that, historically, countries from the global North have always had greater political, media and economic power, which they use to influence other countries” (Shoko, 2010: 45). These dependencies will subside as African countries become more developed. The study therefore found that South Africa, as the strongest sub-Saharan African country, had the highest economic independence and would risk losing its ties with more Northern influencers to grant rights to LGBTIQ individuals based on its own Afrocentric ethics. What
97 was not known at the time, was how this independence manifested in online reports of LGBTIQ issues, such as the ‘queercide’ of lesbians. Still, the study found that South African newspapers were 22% less likely to discuss homosexuality in the context of rights than, for instance, USA Today, an American newspaper. It was also found that newspaper articles that discussed homosexuality in terms of rights often mentioned that policy was misaligned with public opinion as it did not support, for example, same- sex marriages. The study showed how South African attitudes, being situated between the liberal United States of America and the more conservative Uganda in terms of gays and lesbians, demonstrated acceptance of the rights of minority and marginalised communities. The study also showed the relationship between audience temperament and values and the media's influence through representation in the way it reported on LGBTIQ issues. Finally, it described how economically more depressed areas, such as Uganda, tended to have more prejudicial attitudes toward lesbians. The more obvious limitations of the study, as it related to the current research, was its focus on religion, morality and homosexuality, whereas this research focused on the framing and representation of ‘queercide’ as a LGBTIQ issue in online reports and how this knowledge could contribute to the development of a journalistic framework.
Tommaso M. Milani is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and is the Co-Editor of the journals African Studies and Gender and Language. Milani’s (2015) explored an incident that took place at the Johannesburg Pride in 2012.
Activist group One in Nine Campaign attempted to stop the Pride parade by means of a die-in protest, resulting in violence and resistance from the participants. The non-governmental organisation defines itself as “a feminist collective motivated by the desire to live in a society where women are the agents of their own lives” (www.oneinnine.org.za). During the Pride parade, a group of mainly black women carrying life-sized figures, lay flat on the street tarmac before the procession, creating a human roadblock of bodies in front of the incoming celebratory pageant. Carrying the signs “Dying for justice”
and “No cause for celebration”, a few other women stood behind the strip of bodies and asked participants to stop marching and hold a minute of silence in memory of all the Black lesbian women and gender non-normative individuals who had been killed in South Africa because of their non- compliance with gender and sexual normativity. This led to conflict between the non-profit organisation and Pride-goers. The intention of the article was to offer a more multifaceted reading of the event than the media representations, which espoused a clear distinction between a depoliticised Pride and a politically charged protest. Milani’s (2015) argument in the article is that the Pride parade and the One in Nine protest were both public enactments of a homosexual discourse, or what can also be called
‘sexual citizenship’. The idea of sexual citizenship seeks to encapsulate the human-spatial synergy, together with its semiotic and political implications. In the article, Milani (2015) explains that the two strands of socio-linguistic investigations, namely language attitudes and language policy, omit sexuality, being more concerned with multilingualism. This semiotic phenomenon, argues Milani
98 (2015), is tied to ethnic tensions in nation states but does not necessarily reflect on sexuality or gender.
Therefore, in many South African media texts, sexuality and the violence committed as a response to gender non-conformity, reflect an “absent presence” (Derrida, 1997) that can be mobilised to bring language and citizenship and linguistic landscape research into dialogue. According to Milani (2015) sexual citizenship should include a “parallel discursive area where members of subordinate groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1992: 123). Post-Apartheid South Africa is an example of how a political and media entity can control its anti-homosexual rhetoric by regulating itself and internalising human rights (Mutua, 2002: 10), including the rights of lesbians. Milani (2015) reiterates the findings by Msibisi (2012; 2015; 2016), Buiten and Naidoo (2016), and Chakraborti (2017) that studies interrogating the coverage of South African LGBTIQ issues in general and lesbian issues in particular, remain sparse and fail to present robust investigation to the how and why of such issues. Milani’s article contributed to the research by guiding the way in which a case study could be investigated using the Queer Theory to contextualise and understand the data. This article introduces the term ‘sexual citizenship’ that is defined as “a queer, anti-normative linguistic tactic that seeks to capture the spatial nature of sexual politics as conveyed through different forms of meaning making”. In essence, this means how urban spaces are used to present language to create acknowledgement of LGBTIQ issues (Buiten & Naidoo, 2016: 15). However, the significance of this research was vested in the two strands of sociolinguistics, namely 'language attitudes’ (thus, the reality) and 'language policy' (thus, the ideal) as reflections of a queer stance in discourse studies. Also, the article discusses the appearance and significance of fake news in supporting heteronormative power positions by explaining that often, even LGBTIQ stakeholders (thus, gay and lesbian websites writing reports about LGBTIQ issues such as 'queercide') fail to create activism and support for those issues in a habitus or rapture (or momento mori) dichotomy. The article more explicitly bases its findings on the practice-observation, which did not align with the methodology utilised for this research. Many supporting sources referred to are also dated as they are older than 2007, which affects the reliability of the article and its validity in terms of the current research. To overcome this limitation, this research appropriated specific elements of sociolinguistics when in constructing the framework of online reports focusing on ‘queercide’. To support this development, James Lotter’s (2018) definition of ‘homopopulism’, which was formulated after the Orlando shooting in the US, best supported the construction of ‘sexual citizenship’, thus introducing probative language use to uncover reporting attitudes. Here, ‘homopopulism’ refers to the inclusion of the politics of fear of the ‘other’ against the backdrop of a declining neo-liberal world order, where the visibility of lesbian rights causes resistance and creates new marginalising structures that threaten bona fide citizenry. ‘Homopopulism’, therefore reveals the queer logics of the fearful queer sovereign subjects that authorise populism, and the fear-based sovereign leaders who deploy it.
99 It is undeniable that a passionate opposition to gay rights persists in South Africa. The studies included to explore this theme support the idea that these attitudes range from an increase in positivity and acceptance and improved visibility in the media to disapproval and active campaigns to eliminate LGBTIQ individuals. Milani (2015) argues that there are conflicting ideas about how to address the problem even within the LGBTIQ community, and the article cites Lotter (2018) and Adamczyk et al.
(2015) to punctuate how important media are in fuelling, through homopopulism or education, societal perceptions and attitudes.