Colonizing Consent
Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:13th Dec '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£36.99(9781108460316)
Using a wealth of court records, Colonizing Consent shows how rape cases were caught up in, and helped shape, the major political debates in colonial South Africa.
Drawing on more than a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry provides a ground breaking social and political history of rape in colonial South Africa, as well as an important case study for comparative legal history, histories of sexuality, and public policy on sexual violence.Elizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.
'… an interesting read … Thornberry has combed selected court records finely and commented thoughtfully, drawing out conflicting viewpoints advanced within and between the overarching discourses that were deployed to understand sexual violence in the colonial era. It is an important addition to the scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Africa.' Anne Kelk Mager, Social History
ISBN: 9781108472807
Dimensions: 234mm x 157mm x 22mm
Weight: 650g
378 pages