The Short Story: Ghosts and Spectres

Robbins, Ruth

doi:10.1057/9780230281264_8

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…At the turn of the millennium, a South African individual’s lifetime risk of HIV infection was crammed into the few years between the start of sexual activity and their 25th birthday (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2000). By targeting teenagers, loveLife aimed to affect their risk profile before and during sexual debut, thereby impacting on the rate of new infections in the 15–24 year-old cohort, which the programme aimed to halve within five years (Robbins, 2010). The programme combined a high-powered nationwide multimedia campaign with on-the-ground outreach and services in hundreds of communities and thousands of schools in every district of South Africa (loveLife, 2014).…”

Section: Lovelife and The Making Of ‘Make Your Move’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Queer counterpoints: Making ‘mistakes’ in loveLife’s ‘Make Your Move’

Milani

Burnett

2020

Sexualities

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Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-normative individuals in South African townships. We unveil contrapuntally the pushes and pulls between the voice of the authoritative facilitator, aligned with loveLife’s HIV-prevention and youth leadership development methodology, and that of the young woman herself, who volunteered for the intervention, focusing on their disagreement on how best to ‘accommodate’ the prevailing social norms of contemporary South Africa. We also discuss the counterpoint between us – a discourse analyst observing the effects of particular articulations on South African society related to loveLife’s social aims, and the producer of the episode, charged with the protection of the NGO’s brand identity. We conclude that norms governing gender and sexuality in a rapidly evolving society such as South Africa’s are best understood as presenting analysis with dilemmas and contradictions, and that contrapuntal reading is a valuable tool for bringing these tensions under scrutiny without succumbing to the urge to resolve them.

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Section: Lovelife and The Making Of ‘Make Your Move’mentioning

confidence: 99%