Browsing by Author "Fortuin, Bernard Nolen"

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    Institutionalised homosexuality in South Africa: queering same-sex desire
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Fortuin, Bernard Nolen; Viljoen, Shaun; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation looks at South African literary and cultural representations of male homosexual desire from 1948 to 2013. It employs Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics/biopower and Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix amongst others to engage with South African literary and cultural representations of male homosexuality. The country is seen to associate homosexuality with a similar sense of pathology as was the trend in the colonial centre. Later, as the continent comes to rely less on Western frameworks of self-definition there is an indigenisation of these Western identities as they rub up against conservative patriarchy and homophobia. I analyse texts set in the various institutions that form/ed the foundation of the modern capitalist state that is South Africa. They reflect my argument that in a society geared at institutionalising (white) heteronormativity there was/is still space for a queering of self and other which in turn allows moments of intimacy and transgressive dissidence. The homosexual man and his interplay with the heteronormative family, army, schools and prisons reflect the racist and gendered nature of South African society and the problematic way in which femininity has become conflated with a state of subjection. Similarly, homosexuality is seen to become a generative site where performances of masculinity and gender can be queered.
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    Interracial rape and the appropriation of the 'White mask': a psychoanalytical reading of Lewis Nkosi's Mating birds
    (2009-03) Fortuin, Bernard Nolen; Goodman, Ralph; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    This thesis argues that Ndi Sibiya, fictional writer and protagonist of the novel, Mating Birds by Lewis Nkosi develops a pathological obsession with Veronica Slater, a white woman for whose rape Sibiya is about to be executed. One of the many theorists that have commented on the effects of race on sexuality, particularly in colonized black people is Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin White Masks Fanon asks a question based on Freud’s question, “What does a woman want?” Fanon’s question is different in that he asks, what do black people want, which opens the way for a post-colonial psychoanalytical analysis of Ndi Sibiya. What he is concerned with in Black Skin White Masks is a post-colonial psycho-analytical evaluation of the state of being black in colonial societies. Nkosi does the same in his novel, whereas he deals with Apartheid South Africa as an extension of colonialism. Nkosi and Fanon are both addressing the broader psychological impact racially oppressive societies have on the black person’s psyche. Fanon in his psychoanalytical study of the black man from within the Freudian framework aims to save the man of colour from himself (9) by giving black people a warning that is not much different from the warning Sibiya’s father gives to him: do not lust after the white man’s woman.