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.
100 but not on the implications of the production of content for LGBTIQ rights. However, gender sensitivity in media and journalism education is not necessarily regarded as the starting point for changing media operations and content. Because of the influence of feminist scholars such as De Beauvoir, Butler and Dorothy Smith who, together with activists and women media workers created salience for gender issues, education has been recognised as a strategic domain for the promotion of change (Freire, 1970).
According to the coursework recommendation, “gender mainstreaming in journalism was first adopted by the Inter-Press Service News Agency which implemented the policy in 1994 to improve gender equality in both news content and media structures” (Gertseema, 2014: 72) and this appraoch was later also adopted by Media House Policy, “a resource to promote gender-ethical journalism”. The training outline is based on the contributions of educators, scholars and media practitioners globally. Some of the guidelines include implementing the gender mainstreaming principles in the media and journalism education field, and habitualising a diversity of dimensions. This involves an institutional normative framework where “gender equality and gender mainstreaming principles are implemented throughout the curricula, including the adoption of a code to prevent discrimination, harassment, [and] unequal treatment” (Gertseema, 2014: 75). It also proposes to foster consistent content and gender-responsive pedagogical approaches. Some of the recommendations are:
“...[the promotion of] parity of male and female students at schools in all activities, programmes, curricula development and course content which actively focus on gender specific courses within programmes that should be dependent on a gender-sensitive perspective, as well as training lecturers on feminist theories and methodologies to build on the richness of gender analyses and approaches through relevant learning materials such as readings and texts on intersectionality in gender” (Made, 2009: 92).
According to findings by UNESCO (2018), female students at universities outnumber their male contemporaries when they enter the professional field. However, these women tend to have lower status as they are employed to occupy lower income positions and generally find it difficult to reach equality within media and ICT industries. Only a very few are ever promoted to senior and managerial roles in media organisations. Therefore, without women occupying these higher ranked roles, media content is often negatively affected. To train a more gender-aware generation of professionals that may contribute to implementing gender equal principles and gender equal practices in both media content and structures, UNESCO, in partnership with organisations such as UniTWIN University Network on Gender Media and ICTs, has urged member states, universities and other training institutions to adopt a policy and a plan of action on gender equality, particularly where “journalism and communication programmes are offered to guarantee gender mainstreaming in their journalism and communication programmes, with special attention given to digital transformations that have gendered implications for the profession” (Made, 2009: 103). This article suggests that there is a need for a change in journalism curricula for online writing to address gender inequality. Historically, gender mainstreaming for online
101 content was already of importance in journalism and the digital media industry in 1994 with the Press Service News Agency. Media policy and curricula in developing countries such as America also called for the inclusion of feminist theory, such as the Standpoint and Queer theories, to improve writing that is gender egalitarian, critically analysed, and involves intersectionality (Jackoby, 2000).
Although there exists a hypothesis that there are more female online media content writers than males, the patriarchal nature of the journalism industry still means that fewer women occupy managerial roles than males (Boumans, Trilling, & Vliegenthart, 2018). This could explanation why there is a ‘gaze is male’ perspective in online media content. The article reinforces the idea that there is a need to train online content writers so that they are more gender-aware and implement gender equality principles and practices. A limitation of this article for the current study was that it did not address the research problem explicitly, although it contributed to the findings and recommendations chapter as the results addressed gaps in the journalism curricula of universities and other training facilities, which was tangential to the purpose of this research.
The second and final article by Andrea Mariko Grant (2019) describes websites as providing important spaces of aspiration, self-making and active debate. These online platforms for instance allow Rwandans to participate in transnational networks of cultural production and they can therefore participate as connected and ‘modern’ global citizens. Unfortunately, these spaces are often irrational and undemocratic and are heavily gendered and seem disproportionately concerned with policing the behaviour and dress of young women who do not conform to normative standards from a socio-cultural, heteronormative and patriarchal perspective. By their very nature, these online spaces reveal on-going anxieties about women’s sexuality and place in the public sphere and create a moral panic which is especially prevalent when lesbian issues are discussed. Grant (2019: 12) therefore states:
“It seems clear that there are limits to what can and cannot be said in Rwanda’s public sphere and that a few authors have turned their attention to popular culture in the country and how digital technologies and social media might offer other possibilities to discuss gender in a neutral way, particularly for the Rwandan youth.”
Grant (2019) also claims that media technologies are more than mere transmitters of content as they have the ability to represent cultural ambitions, modes of leisure, political machineries, relationships between the body and technology, and the economy. Media technologies create infrastructures and uniquely ideal and perceptual environments and their effects cannot be controlled in advance and are always in some ways excessive. It may be hypothesised that online debates about how women behave, dress and generally perform their femaleness reveal on-going anxieties about women’s sexuality and place in the public sphere. The article argues that, although the Internet in Rwanda can create new
102 spaces of debate and self-making for sexual minorities such as lesbians, it remains heavily influenced by heterosexism. The broader study comprised a 16-month ethnographic fieldwork period in Rwanda between 2011 and 2013, and the data were obtained from interviews with artists, Internet users and entertainment journalists. The article suggests that new media entrepreneurs are constrained by the limits of the technologies – such as dysfunctions of information – available to them, which is apparent when observing how such a media entrepreneur tries to develop a website using slang, entertainment and everyday values of urban life in Kigali, Rwanda. The content of the website used in Grant’s (2019:
46) study includes “rumours and gossip about young women and their sexuality” which, although not a new phenomenon, is more visible and easier to track with the Internet and social media. In Rwanda, this means that “young women are criticised for acting without values determined by patriarchal cultural contexts” (Grant, 2019: 48). Entertainment websites reveal that tropes about ‘loose women’ or women that ‘behave more like men’ continue to circulate, suggesting that the digital youth convened by entertainment websites remains highly patriarchal. This phenomenon reveals a gap between more liberal gender rhetoric and its practices. Although online coverage of female celebrities works to enforce patriarchal understandings of their role in society through story narratives, this does not mean that other viewpoints could not be expressed by those who actively oppose such representations, particularly in the ‘comments’ section. The significance of this study is that it shows online content to have the potential, even in stifling LGBTIQ geo-political contexts, to create awareness and social change as a
‘bottom-up’ practice where communities in remote locations are able to set national agendas. The study was based on investigations of primary and ethnographic fieldwork on entertainment journalists, Internet users and artists, who all provided robust primary data from an African perspective. However, it was found that the ability for online reporters to affect any influence through their writing in the developing South was limited by partial access to technology and that this warranted the development of interventions to bridge the digital divide between areas situated in the more liberal North and conservative South. In developed countries, where Internet technologies are more advanced and their use more ubiquitous, there is better evolved collaboration in the discussion surrounding gender issues.
It is therefore important to consider the stories and slang used in local areas to fully understand the local realities of a country's citizenry, including the South African LGBTIQ community. In Rwanda, as is the case in South Africa (Sicetsha, 2018), women are confronted with a highly patriarchal online public sphere. This is, however, somewhat mitigated through 'comments' sections, where available. This supported the use of 'comment' elements in the quantitative section of the thesis.
The article made it clear that the democratic potential of the Internet should not be naively accepted, and more research is required about online content and feminist discourse. The study that was conducted in Rwanda regarding LGBTIQ rights is limited in the sense that these rights lag far behind those accorded women in South Africa (Msibisi, 2012), and this might affect frames used in online reporting of case studies on 'queercide'. However, this article does refer to how the political environment, from
103 an epistemological perspective, influences the way in which online reports will be written. Rwanda's journalistic practices are considered more restrictive than South Africa's commitment to freedom of speech. Here, the focus is on popular culture and not hard news and or reports on 'queercide' by interest groups.
Because of the Freirian underpinning of the ontological belief in how this critical investigation of the issue of ‘queercide’ had to be investigated, coupled with the use of Standpoint and Queer theories, there was a post-research obligation to recommend the inclusion of audiences in the creation of a journalistic framework for reporting on LGBTIQ issues. Moreover, this should occur through extreme collaboration.
In summation, proclamations of how the South African Constitution, liberal and transformative as it is in its intent, fails to protect and prosper the LGBTIQ community in their lived experience and the proposition that there are Machiavellian, heterosexist forces actively at play in society to target lesbians for murderous purposes, are serious. These claims need to be weighted and critically considered for evidentiary support. The themes introduced in this chapter proposed renewed interest in the news value of certain events to determine why they were selected and in what manner they legitimized the theory of Newsworthiness in reports. Through the discussion of recent studies, including those of Jewkes (2015), Grundlingh (2017), Theo (2017) and Mthembu (2018), the topic was framed within the realities of the lived experiences of lesbians in South Africa, and the need for disruptive thinking about online writing about LGBTIQ issues was underscored. The discourse furthermore described the technical values of online reports, such as word count, ‘social plugins’, the accuracy of online reports, and engaging headlines as ‘codable’ themes. Finally, discrimination against lesbians and the formal acknowledgement of ‘queercide’ as a despicable form GBV was grounded by unpacking the studies conducted by Msibi (2011), Milani (2015) and Lotter (2018).