Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
12 December 2019 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo Johan Roux
Dionne
Dr Dionne van Reenen received her PhD during the December Graduation Ceremonies at the UFS

Very seldom in modern history do we try to critically think about how our bodies and even more those of women are presented in modern popular culture. Through her PhD research project, Dionne van Reenen attempts to critically analyse ideological formations of the body in performance and its discursive distribution in the consumption of contemporary popular media, adding to existing literature and research on the topic.

Her dissertation is titled Performing the Erotic: (Re)presenting the Body in Popular Culture.

Van Reenen, a senior researcher at the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice at the University of the Free State (UFS), received her PhD qualification specialising in English on Wednesday 11 December 2019 during the final ceremony of the December Graduation.

Van Reenen has extensive experience in all areas of education. Her work at the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice is interdisciplinary, involving both everyday and institutional politics. She also holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy, which she obtained in 2013 from the UFS. In 2016, she chaired the UFS Language Policy Review Committee and established the Gender and Sexual Equity Office, which formulated the Sexual Harassment, Misconduct, and Violence Policy at the UFS. 

Changing of social constructs in media consumption

“My study focuses on performative framings of social constructs of gender, race, and class (along with size, age, and ability) in the ordering processes of society,” she says.  These performative framings in are in turn sustained by the (re)presentation of eroticised bodies in popular visual media in the 21st century. “These framings and orderings are critiqued as nothing new, but simply entertainment product that is trading in ideologies and stereotypes that have long been in sociocultural circulation, and they affect how people think, speak and act.” 

The study also shows that the dynamics of ‘virtuality’ and ‘visuality’ in the digital age are altering traditional demarcations of space, place, time, and community, and have paved the way for formations of global cultures that are, at the same time, informative, expedient, empowering, homogenising, prescriptive, and imperialising.

Whilst the #MeToo movement focused more on gender-based violence, gender inequality, and sexual violence, which are big social issues and do not exist in isolation, Van Reenen used her critical philosophical training to understand how, in the current era, the dominant discourse on representations of the body, particularly marginalised bodies, has been constructed at the popular level. 

With every PhD research dissertation the candidate’s main aim is to add new knowledge to a discipline. For Van Reenen, it is important that her research can contribute to a change in social and cultural constructs by re-imagining the (re)presentations of the body in popular media.

News Archive

First Beyers Naudé lecture held at UFS' Qwaqwa Campus
2011-03-15

Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State (UFS), delivered the first lecture to celebrate Dr Beyers Naudé’s life and legacy in a series of public lectures at the UFS’ Qwaqwa Campus.

In his address, Prof. Jansen warned that South Africa cannot afford a genocide of which the seeds are sown by those who continue to use racist and derogatory terms against their fellow citizens.
 
“The present debate in the media that was started by Jimmy Manyi’s comments and subsequently followed by the column by Kuli Roberts in the Sunday World about what they called ‘coloureds’ in the Western Cape, is not a ‘coloured’ debate. It is a South African debate and the silence from certain quarters of our society is disturbing,” said Prof. Jansen.
 
He pointed out that all countries that had previously experienced genocide had started in the same way when “those who were in power chose to keep quiet when wrong and dangerous statements were being uttered”.
 
“This country needs courageous citizens and leaders like ‘Oom Bey’ who sacrificed all the privileges and opportunities of being an Afrikaner in apartheid South Africa. He courageously stood up against his own people by declaring apartheid as evil and un-Christian. That’s the consciousness that all Kovsie students and the entire community must strive for.
 
We want Kovsie graduates who are also graduates of life. We want Kovsie graduates who will have the conscience to question wrong-doing, irrespective of who did it, and irrespective of where wrong-doing is being done. That’s the Kovsies we will all be proud of,” Prof. Jansen concluded. 
 
The lecture was preceded by a student debate on the theme and was the first of the four in the 8th annual Beyers Naudé Memorial Lecture Series themed Conscience and courage in the struggle for justice. The second lecture will be presented by Prof. Kwandile Kondlo, who heads the UFS’ Centre for African Studies, on 28 April 2011, and the main event is scheduled for 9 September 2011.
 
 
Media Release
14 March 2011
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Director: Strategic Communication
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: news@ufs.ac.za
 

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept