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The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2026.
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
2026
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| _version_ | 1867614102790078464 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Baleni, Siphosethu |
| author2 | Du Toit, Louise |
| author_browse | Baleni, Siphosethu Du Toit, Louise |
| author_facet | Du Toit, Louise Baleni, Siphosethu |
| author_sort | Baleni, Siphosethu |
| collection | Thesis |
| dc_rights_str_mv | Stellenbosch University |
| description | Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2026. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/135590 |
| institution | Stellenbosch University (South Africa) |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:46:42.610Z |
| license_str | Other — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from SUNScholar — Stellenbosch University Repository |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publishDateRange | 2026 |
| publishDateSort | 2026 |
| publisher | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| publisherStr | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | SUNScholar — Stellenbosch University Repository |
| spelling | oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/135590 The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry Baleni, Siphosethu Du Toit, Louise Naicker, Veeran Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy. Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2026. Baleni, S. 2026. The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry. Unpublished masters thesis. Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University [online]. Available: https://scholar.sun.ac.za/items/e1804874-8729-4a0e-96bb-92f844bed956 This thesis investigates how the legacies of anti-Black violence continue to shape Black embodiment, perception, and relation in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that anti-Blackness persists not only through material structures such as policing, socioeconomic inequality, and spatial segregation, but also in historically produced affective and existential orientations that become internalised within Black life. Drawing on critical phenomenology, Black feminist theory, and genealogical analysis, the study foregrounds the gendered Black body as a primary site through which these legacies are both lived and reproduced. The thesis contends that to understand the internalisation of anti-Blackness, one must examine the embodied experience of Black subjects — the anxieties, vulnerabilities, habits of vigilance, and inherited orientations that shape how Black people encounter themselves and each other. Chapter 1 establishes the methodological foundation for this inquiry. Drawing from Husserlian phenomenology, Fanon’s account of the racial epidermal schema, Guenther’s analysis of the social and affective horizons of experience, and the Black radical tradition more broadly, the chapter argues that lived experience reveals the quasi-transcendental structures that organise Black life. It positions the body not only as the site on which violence is inscribed, but also as the register through which oppressive histories continue to reverberate in the present. The chapter also integrates intersectional Black feminist thinkers such as Crenshaw, Gqola, hooks, and Phalafala, whose insights illuminate the ways race, gender, sexuality, and space co-constitute the lived conditions of Black subjects. Chapters 2 and 3 form the phenomenological heart of the thesis. Chapter 2 examines the lived experience of the Black man, drawing on Fanon, Biko, and Manganyi, to trace how racialisation forecloses the being of the Black subject, fractures self-relation, and produces an affective world marked by anxiety, suspicion, and hypervigilance. Chapter 3 turns to the lived experience of the Black woman, arguing that she is not a peripheral figure within analyses of anti-Black violence but a central site of its inscription. Through Gqola’s Female Fear Factory, Crenshaw’s intersectionality, and hooks’s insights on domestic discipline and theory as liberatory practice, the chapter shows how fear becomes naturalised, how gendered vulnerability is socially manufactured, and how the Black woman’s movement through space is regulated by atmospheric conditions that mark her as both hypervisible and violable. These chapters together demonstrate that anti-Blackness becomes internalised through sedimented bodily orientations, affective habits, and inherited grammars that shape perception and relation. Chapter 4 shifts from phenomenology to genealogy, tracing how these internalised dynamics were historically produced. Focusing on the colonial discourse of the Black Peril, the chapter shows how racialised sexual hysteria, in which the Black man was positioned as a perpetual threat, the white woman as purity imperilled, and the Black woman as inherently violable, crystallised into laws, spatial configurations, and domestic codes that governed proximity and desire. These discourses hardened into quasi-transcendental structures that continue to organise contemporary imaginaries of danger, respectability, and Black sociality. By tracing the movement from external imposition to internalised orientation, the chapter clarifies how colonial discourses become lived as everyday affect and relationality. Across these movements, the thesis introduces intra-Black intersubjectivity as a conceptual frame for understanding how anti-Blackness circulates within Black social life through inherited affective orientations, perceptual habits, and grammars of relation. It also develops intra-Black intrasubjective refusal, naming the embodied, affective, and ethical labour through which these inheritances are interrogated and unlearned, making possible new modes of self-relation and relation with others. The study concludes that while anti-Black violence endures through sedimented grammars of feeling and perception, these grammars are neither natural nor immutable. They can be recognised, interrupted, and refused, opening the horizon for breathing otherwise and reconstituting modes of being-with that are no longer governed by inherited grammars of anti-Black violence. Masters 2026-04-02T07:19:19Z 2026-04-02T07:19:19Z 2026-03 Thesis https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/135590 en Stellenbosch University 141 pages application/pdf Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| spellingShingle | Baleni, Siphosethu The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title | The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title_full | The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title_fullStr | The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title_short | The Legacies of Violence the Gendered Black Body: A Phenomenological Inquiry |
| title_sort | legacies of violence the gendered black body a phenomenological inquiry |
| url | https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/135590 |
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