The Life and death of Anene Booysen: Colonial discourse, gender-based violence and media representations

This article makes the argument that representations of gendered and sexual violence, its perniciousness and its persistence need to be traced historically, not just to the recent history of apartheid but to a longer colonial history, which has continued relevance for the ways in which bodies and subjectivities are coded. Media reportage on the death of Anene Booysen in 2013 is read through a decolonial feminist lens to argue that it tells us something of the enduring legacy of coloniality, to illustrate how gendered violence is made meaningful in our collective consciousness, and to show that it demands a rethinking of our framing of gendered violence in the present.