Suchergebnisse

In the last years of apartheid, white South African society found itself in the grip of previously unimaginable social and political change, which sometimes manifested in morbid cultural symptoms. This book considers two of those symptoms, a pair of matched moral panics that appeared in the contemporary media and in popular literature. It argues that excessive reactions to the apparent threat posed by a cult of white Satanists, never proven to exist, and to a so-called epidemic of white family murder reveal important truths about fear, violence and resistance, as well as fragmentations within the poles of white South African identity: nationalism, gender, history, the family, even whiteness itself. Together, the Satanism scare and the family murder 'epidemic' draw a compelling picture of the psychic landscape of white culture at the end of apartheid, revealing both pathological responses to social change and the brutalising effects that apartheid had on those who benefited from it most.

This article is concerned with the continued salience of the notion of moral panic, an idea that has been both enormously influential in sociological and media research and has come under fire for various flaws. It reviews some of the most common critiques of moral panic, discussing why these are valid and where they fall short, and adds new comments on some weaknesses in the theory. It goes on to argue that the term and the idea of moral panic continue to have value as critical tools, but require updating. Suggested further developments include broadening moral panic to allow for analyses that consider the global south; taking account of the narrative layering that characterises these episodes; considering the intersection of moral panics and digital media; centralising fear and anxiety in moral panic research; considering moral panics as an interdisciplinary framework rather than as a strict model; and invoking a psychoanalytic rhetoric to further explain how moral panics work and what they do.

This article discusses the discursive and narrative intersections between two moral panics that appeared in the white South African press in the last years of apartheid: the first around the claimed danger posed by white male homosexuals, the second around the alleged incursion of a criminal cult of white Satanists. This connection was sometimes implicit, when the rhetoric attached to one was repeated with reference to the other, and sometimes explicit, when journalists and moral entrepreneurs conflated the two in public dialogue. Both Satanists and gay white men were characterized as indulging in abnormal practices that were dangerous to the health of the nation, using a long-standing colonial metaphor of sanitation and hygiene. I argue that fears of homosexuality and beliefs in Satanism operated as social control measures for disciplining potentially unruly groups whose sexual or personal practices were not admissible within apartheid's injunctions on homogenous conformity among whites. The connection between homosexuality and Satanism, like the connection between homosexuality and communism, served to pathologize whites whose disobedient bodies and beliefs were considered treacherous.

This article explores representations of black South African family structure in the popular local reality television programme Date My Family. Focusing on visual and verbal discourses, it considers the programme's cultural relevance, presentation of social circumstances and understandings of black South African identity in relation to family structure. Within the world of Date My Family, western/European conceptions of the nuclear family, so often valorised within reality TV, are renegotiated, and families exhibit the more commonly African extended form. At the same time gender relations within these families shift away from apparently traditional modes, with female-headed households and absent fathers common. The extended families that feature in Date My Family reflect the fluidity and variability of contemporary norms of gender and family among black South Africans.