Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius.
NEWS ANALYSIS
The year 2015 marks 20 years since the legendary moment when Nelson Mandela donned the Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in a bold display of racial reconciliation. This invitation to whites to feel welcome in a democratic South Africa stands as one of the most iconic moments in the post-apartheid transition.
Yet it is rarely acknowledged that the Springbok image not only signified racial oppression, but also national investments in hypermasculine men who were pitched in discourse and policy as natural heroic conquerors and protectors. Unwittingly, Mandela’s lauded act gave a pernicious nod to this macho culture and, chafing with the Constitution that enshrined female and homosexual rights, it signaled that conventional gender stereotypes would remain unchallenged.
Two decades on, sporting hero Oscar Pistorius came to embody this very ideal; since his trial, “the fastest man on no legs” signifies in contradictory terms the bawling, physically vulnerable anti-male and the testosterone-pumped superman.
The story of one man’s triumph over adversity has been rewritten to depict an over-compensating, gun- and car-obsessed paraplegic, whose ambition to compete among the able-bodied formed part of an attempt to recast his transgressive image in the shape of the normal South African male. Trial coverage portraying a weeping, retching, “legless South African”, repackaged Pistorius as the man who dangerously strove beyond his capabilities and overshot the mark, killing an innocent woman, his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, in the process.
According to a 2013 global review of available data on the UN Women website, more than a third of women worldwide experience gender-based or sexual violence. South Africa alone has “the highest rate ever reported in research anywhere in the world” with an estimated three women killed every day by their partners.
The high-profile nature of the Pistorius case presented an opportunity for a public re-evaluation of the hypermasculine ideal and its destructive impact.
It’s four months since the verdict and at least 10 books have been published on the trial, excavating untold emotional and analytical angles to uncover where it all went wrong for the nation’s beloved son. Could this vigilant dissection reveal a burgeoning desire to dethrone the hypermasculine ideal, which Pistorius came to embody?
The major swath of commentary has rejected this opportunity, stripping the athlete of the masculinity markers attached to his celebrity status and fuelling the conservative urge to point the finger at the man rather than the construct.
Melinda Ferguson and Patricia Taylor’s anticipatory account, Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen, plays into the compulsion to crush the accused and abandon the need for national introspection on why we embrace hypermasculinity in our male icons. Taylor, the mother of Pistorius’s ex-girlfriend Samantha Taylor, gives an ominous rendering of the “cracks” and “warning signs” that she intuited in Pistorius long before Steenkamp’s death.
For Taylor, Pistorius’s disability combined with fame and a “desperate need to be one of the boys” is a fatal formula. This personal testimony slides into an unsavoury attack on the over-ambitious disabled man, illuminating the degree of public resistance to engage with the unpalatable fact that Pistorius – in both heyday and downfall – is a product of his hypernormative surroundings.
By contrast, John Carlin’s The Trials of Oscar Pistorius: Chase Your Shadow acknowledges the pressure placed on Pistorius to hide his insecurities and limitations. Carlin resists the popular instinct to disagree with Judge Thokozile Masipa’s ruling, perceiving Pistorius as “a man of many masks” whose prison experience might afford him the “mental space to ponder at last who he was, who he wanted to be and which mask fitted him best”.
The analysis is alluring in its even-handed subtlety, but even Carlin falls prey to the dissecting impulse when he psychoanalyses Pistorius as “a teenager in an adult’s body, prone to foolish infatuations with women in whom he imagined he saw the image of his mother”. Following this pop-Freudian reading, Pistorius’s character warps into something unnatural, establishing a distance between his motherless upbringing and that of the normal son who supposedly develops less relationship complexes when given access to a present mother.
The differences in public responses are telling about how charged the case became – not least for the white South African male who wags his finger in your face professing disinterest in a story about white trash that has nothing to do with him. The tendency to establish distance, be it through engagement or indifference, has proved a popular strategy of disavowal.
The distancing delusion, coupled with the muted desire to “out” the components of a patriarchal hierarchy, is presciently tackled in two post-apartheid novels, The House Gun (1998) by Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). Both authors imagine the cathartic act of subjecting the white South African male – as killer or rapist – to a trial or disciplinary hearing. These fictional trials explore the angry, vengeful impulses denied in the reconciliation process and exemplified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Whereas Disgrace concludes with an ostracised, emasculated white male protagonist with a place in the new South Africa, in The House Gun he is demoted, but not destroyed; investment is placed in the all-encompassing Constitution.
Each story refuses a tidy conclusion that an approach of either ruthless blame or complete forgiveness might serve as the ultimate strategy for disturbing South Africa’s deep-rooted patriarchal structures.
But in the latest national drama, which cannot be remedied in fictional rainbow terms, a pervasive narrative of Pistorius’s hypermasculine betrayal has emerged. The complex terms on which his downfall has played out can be tracked in relation to key moments in the trial.
First, advocate Barry Roux’s defence that the screams heard after the gunshots by Pistorius’s neighbours belonged to the accused, not the deceased. Although the claim went unsubstantiated, warranting necessary suspicion, at the time, the notion that Pistorius “screams like a woman” triggered sniggers in the courtroom as well as media ridicule, revealing resistance to the possibility of a womanly masculinity.
The clash of a hypermasculine character exuding a high-pitched wail was neatly reconciled when twisted to figure in the interrogation of the dark side of the accused, with which a hidden or feigned feminine side was conflated. Reverse the scenario to a woman shouting like a man and would the claim prompt the same front-page attention?
Second, when Pistorius took to the stand mid-trial, prosecutor Gerrie Nel played the clip of the accused at a shooting range blasting a watermelon apart with a firearm, which he gleefully refers to in the video as a “Zombie stopper”. With heightened dramatic effect, Nel followed the footage with the gruesome image of Steenkamp’s blood-spattered head, beginning the cross-examination with the image of a reckless, insensitive, hot-blooded male who needed to be taken down.
The evidence for Pistorius’s hypermasculine character presented the very opposite image of the vulnerable young man depicted by his legal team. In this unconventional courtroom move, the notion of “the two Oscars” was planted in the national imagination, sparking a further schizophrenic wielding of the media’s critical knife, used to expose both an underlying bravado as well as an inadequate effeminacy.
This textured image of a fallen titan was further complicated in the sentencing arguments when Roux likened Pistorius’s life-long disability to the slow-burn effect of a woman who experiences domestic abuse and ends up turning on her partner. Inevitably, the parallel struck a nerve with commentators who saw the case as illuminating what academic Helen Moffett has termed an “unacknowledged gender civil war” in South Africa. With the issue of femicide and sexual violence pervading the papers in light of the trial, the comparison threatened to redirect analysis on overly empathetic terms.
And yet these claims to a womanly male icon also scramble the presumed components of the men we prop up as heroes. The image of heterosexual male femininity it reconstructs offers in some strange way, a refreshing, even a queering, prompt for interrogation and re-evaluation of the rigid binary system through which gender continues to be forged 20 years since the compulsory hypermasculine construct was allowed to slip under the radar.