Troubling Apprehensions of Gender-Based Violence in South Africa: Fanon’s Sociogeny as a Psychosocial Lens

Abstract

ABSTRACT Threading across different discursive, cultural, and political moments of the postapartheid context, gender-based violence, inarguably, is a phenomenon that must be read contextually and as contingent upon intersecting configurations of power that are tied to historical, political, and material fractures of our colonial legacies. Three immediate intersecting threads of analyses are undertaken here: (1) how extant knowledge archives on gender-based violence discursively reference spatial geographies and frozen temporalities of violence that result in the implicit racialization of gender-based violence and the psychological pathologization of its associated subjectivities in South Africa; (2) using Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, we read gender-based violence through a psychosocial lens to address this problematic; and (3) extending Fanon’s idea of psychopolitics, we argue that the trauma, racial alienation, and toxic gendering of society within coloniality is reflected in a neurotic structuring of the psyche itself.