Paper short abstract:

This study reconstitutes the roles of identity categories such as gender, sexuality, age, and race in outlining the parameters of ‘truth’ for transgression, victimhood and violence. This is achieved by critically analysing discourses utilised by female and child perpetrators and male victims.

Paper long abstract:

Violence is constructed by discourses that constrain men to perpetrators and women and children to victims. Categories of race and class further limit these constructions in South Africa due to multiple and diverse identities and the current explosion of public and scientific possibilities for violence driven by social inequalities and high rates of crime and sexual violence. This research aims to interrogate the cultural conditions that make possible forms of violence that disrupt our understandings of 'truth' and reality. The study thus turns to female and child perpetrators of physical and sexual violence and to male victims as targets for data collection. These configurations of the child-transgressor, woman-transgressor, and male victim offer an opportunity to decipher the material conditions that make such formulations possible and the elements of the cultural milieu that contribute to the surfacing of these 'new' transgressions in the psychological, legal and criminal disciplines and, thus, the public consciousness. The critical framework lends itself to critical discourse analyses based on participants' case files, court proceedings and interviews. This process will surface those discursive coordinates that make them 'real' and fathomable perpetrators and/or victims in the current South African landscape. By calling into question the universality of 'truths' about gender, sexuality, age and race and identifying the cultural conditions of possibility for victimhood and perpetration, this research intends to demonstrate how social, contextual and political categories define, limit and demarcate possibilities for identity in violent encounters.