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Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia.

This chapter proposes an intersectional feminist lens as a means to tackle three common classroom challenges in teaching about gender-based violence (GBV): student resistance to a gender lens on violence; the tendency in university classrooms to highlight some experiences of violence and to silence others; and the proneness for classrooms to reproduce their own social arrangements and power relations. Our argument is that, while it presents challenges, teaching GBV through an intersectional feminist approach offers an effective means to address these issues. By ‘doing diversity’ within our classrooms in this way, we can communicate the value of a gender lens on violence while being inclusive of a wider range of student experiences and challenging existing silences and knowledge hierarchies around GBV. This chapter outlines some of the challenges the authors have experienced in teaching GBV at university, and what a feminist intersectional lens in this context means and can offer. It concludes with a reflection of some of the challenges and principles for its implementation.

Terms such as “gender-based violence” are connected with a range of evolving discourses that are not merely descriptive, but interpretive and political in nature. Yet, what makes violence “gender-b...

Late in 2016, a news story broke of a “porn-sharing site” on which over 2000 sexual images of Australian teen girls, from over 70 high schools, were uploaded without their consent. News media chara...

With rates of rape in South Africa among the highest in the world, the significance of context has surfaced repeatedly in South African scholarship on rape. Most commonly, rape is understood as a symptom of deep and pervasive gender inequality, historical, social and economic legacies of apartheid as well as post-apartheid state discourses that have normalized rape and enabled it to be tolerated. In addition, the role of masculinities has received significant attention, linked to social and economic histories and contemporary political narratives. This article considers how scholarly discussions on rape in South Africa are evolving. Applying a critical sociological lens of enquiry to the ways in which the problem of rape is constructed, it outlines the significance of state histories in understandings of rape in South Africa today, the explicit and implicit ways in which research and writing on rape is racialized and classed, and considers the implications of this.

Despite apparent feminist advancements within contemporary South Africa, gender transformation in the media industry has been both limited and irregular. Based on interviews with journalists and editors from three weekly newspapers – the Sunday Times, the Sunday Sun and the Mail & Guardian – this article explores how journalists articulate their understandings of gender and gender transformation within the media, and reflects on how these articulations draw on wider feminist discourses in South Africa. While journalists express an engagement with feminist thought and advocacy around the media, this is largely limited to liberal feminist discourses with an emphasis on women's inclusion in the media. The limitations of this discourse have implications for the kinds of gender transformation occurring within the news media, and it is argued that the advancement of a ‘progressive’ feminist lens can contribute towards more comprehensive gender transformation within the industry.

The South African print news media have witnessed a sharp rise in tabloidised news forms and newspapers in recent years. While tabloidisation offers interesting possibilities in terms of c...

South African feminisms have been shaped as much by struggles for political and racial equality as by national and transnational struggles for gender equality. Forged in the context of anti-apartheid struggles, early feminist concerns were largely subsumed by, and mobilized in the service of, African and Afrikaner nationalisms. The transition to democracy in 1994 provided a critical juncture for ensuring that the priorities of the post-apartheid state included gender equality and equitable representation of women. While this was largely achieved in formal institutional and legal terms, feminist activism and radical transformational politics were largely diluted, and current debates center around the role of “state feminism” in relation to civil society. Contemporary South African feminisms continue to engage deeply with questions of difference at the intersection of gender and the role of feminism within broader national and international struggles for class and racial equality. Keywords: feminisms; gender equality; nationalism; race and racism; women's movements