Children, Pathology and Politics:Genealogical Perspectives on the Construction of the Paedophile in South Africa

[摘要] Through an analysis informed by the genealogical method as derived from Foucault(1980a), this study examines the discourses and material conditions that haveproduced the South African paedophile. Archival texts and contemporary discursivematter are critically analysed against the backdrop of the material conditions ofpolitical possibility with which they intersected to construct the paedophile of theSouth African present. The study traces constructions of the paedophile as a relativelyinnocuous nuisance in a selected sequence of past historical periods through to therecidivism, sexual malice and aggression that define its contemporarycharacterisations.In South Africa, practices such as surveillance and disciplines the likes ofdemography and psychology became integral to the effective management andregulation of a distinctly racialised population. It was precisely through these forms ofapartheid governance and power that the conditions for the emergence of thepaedophile in South Africa were produced. This early paedophilia threatened thefuture purity of South African whiteness and therefore the integrity of the apartheidstate. The racialised constructions of sexuality of the time precluded the assimilationof blackness into the discursive matrix of paedophiliac desire.The impending collapse of apartheid signalled the reconstitution of black children.While apartheid constructed black children as posing a fundamental threat to whitehegemony, discourses beginning in the mid 1980s repositioned them as vulnerablevictims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse(CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. Paedophilia however, remaineda powerful component of this burgeoning discourse. Locating blackness within thefields of discipline and desire, in turn produced the material conditions for an everexpandingnet of paedophiliac suspicion. This new biopolitical dispensation affixesthe paedophiliac crime to all in its scope, such that the symptomatic desire of the onceperipherally pathological paedophile can now be insinuated into the fantasies andpractices of all of the citizens of a recently 'liberated” and democratic South Africa.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand