GBV shutdown goes beyond economic cessation

THE persistent and structural crisis of gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa necessitates an analytical hermeneutic that decisively anchors its genesis within the enduring colonial matrix of power (colonialidad del poder), Foucauldian modalities of power/knowledge, and spatialised dispositifs of oppression and resistance.

- ITUMELENG D. MOTHOAGAE

THE failure of the post-apartheid state apparatuses to curb GBV can be read as a systemic act of abandonment, says the writer.

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This colonial matrix establishes and sustains the racialised and patriarchal hierarchies that subsequently consign specific subjectivities and corporeal realities, particularly those of Black women, queer, and trans persons, to the necropolitical calculus and the status of social death (Mbembe).

This matrix is inextricably entangled with the coloniality of being, wherein colonial modernity not only subjugates populations materially but inflicts existential dispossession, constituting these corporeal forms as ontologically marginalised, dwelling in Fanon's abject “zone of non-being.”

The violence against these marginalised corporeal forms is fundamentally an act of ontological denial and epistemological dispossession.

The failure of the post-apartheid state apparatuses to curb GBV can be read as a systemic act of abandonment, effectively exposing these lives to perpetual precarity and affirming their consignment to necropolitical calculus. The hyper-masculine discursive apparatuses treat the Black body not as a sovereign self, but as a territory to be conquered, disciplined, or owned.