Gillian Schutte

Deconstructing ‘sugar daddies’

Mpho, who lives in Alex, tells me how “sugar daddies” hit the townships on weekends in their smart cars. They cruise the streets looking for young flesh. One thing the sugar daddies rely on is the teenage hunger for bling-bling. They know that teenagers crave to feel they are part of the world of glamour…

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Lynching black men

On March 1 we watched in disbelief and horror as a young Mozambican man, Mido Macia, was forcibly handcuffed to the back of a police van and dragged behind the vehicle as he cried out for them to stop. When the car eventually arrived at the police station eyewitnesses say he was further beaten by…

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One billion bodies reclaimed

In the past few years there have been waves of feminine revolution that have been directly rooted in body, art and the carnivalesque. Not essentialism mind you, but with the clear mandate of deconstructing the patriarchal hold over language and behaviour which defines feminine sexuality and controls, oppresses and destroys the combined woman. The Slut…

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One Billion Rising — South Africa

(Scroll through to hear the voices of women as they call for an end to violence against the feminine.) “In my mind we need to transcend the Cartesian mind/body dualism and bring back the pantheistic experience of the body with its sexuality and intellect indivisibly united — in a celebration that dances wildly in the…

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Dear White People

I have decided to start the New Year with a letter to you all. It is a letter that implores you to wake up and smell Africa with a fresh white nose. Before you get angry and defensive, think of this letter as a crash course survival kit for navigating a new reality, and please…

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O is for Orgasm

Since it is the holiday season and because so many people have assured me that I am “shrill”, “aggressive”, “in need of a good fuck”, et al &ndash none of which I accept, by the way – I thought I would give those who feel victimised by the matter of white privilege and racism a…

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Unpacking the discourse of domination

Over this past year I have written a series of essays that attempt to deconstruct the “discourse of domination” and have provided the links to these articles in this piece. These essays were written in response to a series of racialised events that happened in South Africa in 2012 — occurrences, which I posit, are…

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I know whiteness through and through

Racism is alive and living in the confines of the whiteness construct. This year alone has thrown up many local and global racist incidents that prove that we are a long way off from a post-racist society. It seems to me that whiteness is losing the plot and in serious need of deconstruction — hence…

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Dear Brendon Henry Shields,

I am writing to let you know that your whiteness is not my whiteness. I am doing this because contained within your “frank” confessional piece is the absolute assumption that this discourse represents all white views. Your tone is jocular, earnest and guileless — in fact I can almost visualise you patting yourself on the…

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Lady Gaga, the avatar

Madonna modelled herself on a sexually unrestrained, powerful and de-sanitised version of Marilyn Monroe and rebelled against patriarchal Catholic constraints of the feminine, using the notion of wanton sexuality as her arsenal. Michael Jackson refused to be categorised according to race and gender and mixed these up in both theatrics and surgery, to much public…

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