Black women and gender non-conforming persons and technology-facilitated gender-based violence: A decolonial feminist exploration

The current surge in technology-facilitated communication has created an online space for various uses and a platform for possible harm. Men’s voices have dominated the internet and social media, and as in much public discourse, women’s voices are often relegated to the sidelines. Scholars argue that gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa (SA) merits the same urgency as the country’s other health and socio-political issues. In addition to the current spike in the prevalence of GBV in SA, the country context is highly racialised both in historical and contemporary terms, with an entrenched patriarchal system wherein men are systematically afforded more social and political power. In this context, women are more likely to experience GBV.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is significantly under- researched in South Africa. Internationally, very little research on online forms of GBV adopts a more expansive, historical approach to the enactment of this violence. Furthermore, research on black women and gender non-conforming individuals’ experiences of online GBV is notably lacking. All these factors encourage interest in how online spaces are used to combat GBV, as well as what the experiences of online violence look like for marginalised groups. We begin addressing these gaps in this report. Our research aims to address some of the gaps in the literature through contributions from two research projects: an honours research project on black women and gender non-conforming persons’ experiences of TFGBV and a PhD research project on black African women and gender non-conforming journalists and bloggers’ experiences of TFGBV. The data we present in this project is drawn from these two projects. Both projects take a decolonial feminist lens, which aims to take a historically contextualised view on GBV, recognising patriarchy’s colonial roots within the context of South Africa and the African continent and actively resisting coloniality through knowledge production. Below, we begin our discussion with an overview of the complexity of gender-based violence in South Africa in relation to the country’s violent history.