"There's Plenty of Rapists Here": "Rape Culture" and the Representation of Anene Booysen's Rape in the International and South African Press

On February 1, 2013, seventeen-year-old Anene Booysen was found in a construction site in the town of Bredasdorp, South Africa, where she had been gang raped and left to die.¹ Despite the shocking details of Booysen's death, her rape entered into both local and international media for its transnational connection to a similar crime that occurred two months earlier in Delhi, India. In the latter incident, a twenty-three-year-old medical student, Jyoti Singh, was gang raped on a bus in Delhi and later died in hospital. While Singh's death was a sensation in the international media, with "1,515 articles appear[ing] in the United States alone within … two month[s]," Booysen's death was generally only given significance through comparisons to the Delhi rape (Roychowdhury, 282). By contrasting the two cases, the international press diagnosed the South African response to Booysen's rape as inadequate when compared to the national outrage that followed Singh's death in India, while at the same time relegating these brutal versions of gendered violence to those other, "less civilized" locales. By analyzing the representation of these crimes in the international media, with a particular emphasis on Booysen's rape, I will show that the concept of rape culture is invested with different meanings depending on the situations described and the contexts in and from which the term is mobilized.

Despite its association with the radical feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s, talk of rape culture has regained momentum in the North American public sphere alongside such diverse controversies as Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines," the Steubenville rape case, and Todd Akin's infamous comments that "legitimate rape" does not result in pregnancy. While the reactions to and contexts of these crimes and controversies vary, when North Americans talk about rape culture the focus is often on structural issues: modes of representation that facilitate sexual violence, alcohol abuse in high schools and universities, and the failure of people in positions of power to take rape seriously. In contrast, the use of the label "rape culture" to describe contexts in the Global South is invariably linked to shockingly violent crimes.

In North American and European popular discourse, the treatment of women is regularly used to index modernization; for this reason, conversations about so-called rape cultures in the Global South are inevitably intertwined with global circuits of power. The treatment of the Singh and Booysen rapes in the international press reflects Gayatri Spivak's well-known claim illuminating the "collective fantasy" of colonialism: "White men are saving brown women from brown men" (48). For Spivak, the Global North reinforces its self-fashioning as the protector of global well-being by considering the "third-world woman" to be in need of protection from "her own kind" (50–52). Taking Spivak's claim as my starting point, I am interested in how the rubric of rape culture circulates and accrues different currency depending on context, with the potential of producing a disciplinary gaze that revives colonial stereotypes of brown and black men as unruly and violent, and displaces more extreme forms of gendered violence onto "less civilized" countries.

While rape culture as a concept finds its provenance in second-wave feminism, the dynamics that form our understanding of it have a much longer history. In his meditation on marriage and indictment of emergent women's movements, Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon describes men and women as characterized by "force" and "beauty" respectively. Proudhon's argument reflects these beliefs about female vulnerability, while it also performs a desire to police women's emancipation by restricting their sexual and intellectual "promiscuity," marked by his term pornocracy. Proudhon is troubled by what he sees as the intellectual equivalent of sexual promiscuity: women entering into social and intellectual spheres usually preserved for men, "salons, … academies, … bars, etc." For Proudhon, the woman who refuses to be defined purely in terms of "beauty" and enters into the realm of "force" threatens traditional...