1.12 Research impression
1.12.5 Paulo Freire
In his book entitled The radical pedagogies of Socrates and Freire: Ancient rhetoric/radical praxis, Stephen Brown (2012) situates contemporary critical praxis at the intersection of the teaching philosophies of Socrates and Paulo Freire. Brown (2012: 35) “not only sheds new light on the surprising and significant points of intersection between ancient rhetoric and radical praxis as embodied in the teaching philosophies of Socrates and Freire, [but he also uses] the philosophy of each to illumine the teaching of the other”. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1921-1997), a Brazilian educator and critical theorist, describes the difference between banking education and liberating education as an exercise in praxis, which refers to combining reflection and action to invent and reinvent reality (Brown, 2012). The interpretation of Freire’s work provides a teaching and learning pedagogy of internal
36 decolonisation – so the question is posed: Is being gay un-African, unnatural and sinful to heal the self?
Freire espouses two truths that need acknowledgment for emancipatory conscientisation to occur: first, oppression exists and secondly, the transformation and liberation of the oppressed are possible.
Therefore, the causes of oppression have to be located and reality needs to be transformed. Praxis is a dialectical process where true and emancipatory learning happens through critical questioning (Freire, 1970). In this argument Freire intersects with Butler as both emphasise disrupting current beliefs and realities by recommending teachings in dissent, even though the initial intention of Freire’s work centres around education and Butler’s is concerned with third-wave feminism. The works of both, in a multidisciplinary way, explain the alienation that occurs when people have limited control over their own lives. In this way there is even an interpolation of Marxism, which is a Communist ideology about human existence and struggle.
Freire (1970) argues that the oppressor-oppressed relationship is dehumanising to both. He proposes engagement with audiences through dialogue because, without questioning, critical thinking, praxis, emancipatory conscientisation and revolutions of invention and reinvention, healing the relationship will not be possible. Anti-dialogic and dialogic processes can be presented as “matrices of opposing theories of cultural action − the latter as an instrument of oppression and the former as an instrument of liberation” (Freire, 1970: 54). “The theory of anti-dialogical action and its characteristics include conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion, and a divide-and-rule approach, while the theory of dialogical action [with its accompanying] characteristics includes cooperation, unity, cultural synthesis and organisation” (History is a weapon, 2003: 7-8). Therefore, no reflection leads to activism that has no way of determining its effectiveness, while continuous reflection without implementation relegates ideas to dithering – theory and revolution should thus occur in tandem with one another (History is a weapon, 2003). Of significance to the current research was Freire’s idea of problem posing education.
This refers to the way learners (or media audiences) are able to fully engage with what they are being taught through media content. No longer will the teacher be the one to teach and students the ones to learn, as students will teach as well and teachers will also learn. In this context everyone has a unique point in life. If everyone works together, according to Freire, they all could use their unique points of view to build knowledge (Webber, 2014).
Problem posing education ties in with the Standpoint Theory as it relates to media content creation and presents new and significant ideas around power relationships. This ideology proposes that power should not merely be identified and understood for the emancipation of oppressed groups, but it should also be used to identify the legitimate power occupation of groups in specific contexts. Therefore, members of the LGBTIQ community have to appear in a hierarchal position in mechanisms concerning them; thus, in the absence of such members, those consulting LGBTIQ discourses should enjoy power privileges.
37 1.12.6 Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler, born on 24 February 1956, is a gender theorist and American philosopher whose work has influenced the fields of third-wave feminism, queer and literary theory, political philosophy, and ethics (Comstock, 2017). Similar to Erwin Goffman’s (1959) The Presentation of self in everyday life, Butler does not think about acting in the theatrical sense, but rather as the discourse of ‘acts’ that maintain associative semantic meaning with theories of acting and performance. Butler echoes De Beauvoir’s sentiments that “one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman” as gender is not a stable identity or locus of agency where various acts originate from. Rather, it is an identity which is sensitive to its environment created over time through stylised repetition of acts (Butler, 1988). Butler therefore describes the “woman” as a social, political, economic and cultural construction where “womanness”
is performed and understood in those contexts, but where it is not fully and honestly portrayed and therefore misunderstood and vulnerable to power dynamics (Butler, 1993).
Butler (1990) asks if “woman” is a universal term. This questions the relationship between sex and gender. The difference is that sex is the anatomical body parts like the penis and vagina, while gender is the socially constructed performance that identifies an individual as male or female. Gender is then not inherent to being. Butler (1993) also claims that sex is merely a created category with no inherent inner truth. “Sex is always already gender according to the heterosexual matrix, which is a grid of naturalised bodies and desires” (Butler, 1993: 12). The problem with the heterosexual matrix is that it only considers certain identities and all others are outside of it and are philosophically erased or ignored.
The heterosexual matrix is indelible and is impossible to overcome without an evolution of thinking about this matrix. Therefore, Butler (1993) suggests that “...sexual minorities – such as lesbians – and people with excluded identities need to form a coalition in order to transcend the existing categories of identity” (Comstock, 2017: 16).
This chapter introduced the recently proposed concept of ‘queercide’ by contextualising its occurrence and embedding it in the South African socio-cultural, legal, political, ethical and economic environment. The discourse established the phenomenon as a current LGBTIQ issue within the media field that can – and should − be investigated by constructing a philosophical support for its understanding. Such a process underpinned the data analysis for the purposes of this research.
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2 CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
“That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply
that repetition itself ought to be stopped – as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of
subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”
- Butler (1990: 42) -
In this chapter theories of importance are discussed in order of significance and ability to contextualise the data that were obtained to address the research problem adequately. The framing and representation theory by Gregory Bateson (1972) will be discussed, followed by a discussion of the theory of newsworthiness as understood by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965). The research also explores contributions to this theory by Yvonne Jewkes (2004) and its critical deconstruction by Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy (2007). Discussions of the Standpoint Theory of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807) and the Queer Theory of Teresa de Lauretis (1990) will follow. Sections of the Social Responsibility Theory of Dag Westerståhl (1983) will be referenced to address the need for understanding ‘free press’ and how this freedom is contextualised in terms of LGBTIQ issues and news values. The theories that succinctly presented in this section assisted in the research’s attempts to describe the online framing of reports on lesbian murders and thus to extend existing knowledge in this filed within the limits of the bounding assumptions of critical relativism. The purpose of this chapter is to present the research’s exploration of these theories as an assembly in order to legitimise the findings and inductively motivate new ways of a quality reporting framework on LGBTIQ issues online. The major assumptions of each of the theories will be discussed as they supported the principles that the research examined. Criticisms judging each theory and discourse about them by other theorists to improve scholarly understanding of the theories as they relate to this research problem are also unpicked. The contribution of these theories to illuminate evaluative criteria, philosophical scope, appropriateness, heuristic value, validity, parsimony and openness (Littlejohn, Oetzel & Foss, 2017:
14-17) provided a robust consideration of the data and underscored findings of the academic lacuna that exist as it pertains to the research, and its utility in contextualising data.