User:Carbon Caryatid/test

Compiled and placed on a subpage of my userpage til I have (or someone more prompt has) a chance to synthesise the info into Caster Semenya.

Who drew the comparison in South Africa

ANC MPs (with specific responsibilities) 1. Peace Mabe 2. Butana Komphela

Julius T-shirt joke falls flat. Image meant to 'poke fun' at Malema 'racist, sexist'. Nov 10, 2009 10:34 PM | By LAUREN COHEN and NIVASHNI NAIR

Laugh It Off spokesman Ruan Kemp said the image, which he designed in "a few minutes", was "meant to poke fun at Malema" and comments he made regarding the Caster Semenya debacle, in which South Africa's women's 800m world champion was forced to undergo gender testing. Malema said that "hermaphrodites do not exist" in his language, Pedi, and therefore Semenya was not a hermaphrodite as claimed in international media. Baartman was shipped to England in the 1800s, given the name Hottentot Venus and paraded as a sexual freak before the public.

African commentary

Caster-Gate: the real Villains Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 by Carlos Amato in Mahala, a "South African music, culture and reality magazine that strives to report and represent what's really happening" Butana Komphela is the "chairperson of the portfolio committee on sport and recreation" and ANC member of parliament whose comments have led to calls for sanction e.g. here.

So Butana Komphela reckons Caster Semenya is “the new Saartjie Baartman”. The comparison is an insult to both women. It trivialises Baartman’s story, and cynically sensationalises Semenya’s. Baartman was a slave, lured across the ocean and humiliated until her death at 25 by the grotesque pseudoscientific racism and sexism of early 19th-century Europe. Semenya’s humiliation is not remotely comparable — and in any case, Europeans are not to blame for it. The IAAF had no choice in the end but to require gender tests (though they should have ensured their intentions were not leaked to the media). She does have a freakishly masculine physique, especially for one so young, and it’s their duty to ensure fair competition. End of story.

Castigated and celebrated Mark Gevisser. Aug 30, 2009. The Sunday Times (South Africa)

Much of it seems driven by grievance, by the sense that South Africans have been denied a rightful reward. There was conscious reference, by parliamentarians, to Saartjie Baartman, and perhaps the national anger at Semenya's humiliation arises out of what we might call our Bartman Complex, a particularly South African anxiety, that we will gain notoriety for our alleged abnormality rather than celebrity for our excellence. Or, worse yet, that we will be revealed as Mugabes rather than Madibas; that the world will take away our gold medal and label us freakish instead.

Sensationalizing Semenya by Sokari Ekine (Nigerian social activist) in the blog of the New Internationalist, Wednesday, September 2, 2009

This [the gender verification test] is extremely intrusive and raises memories of the objectification of Sara Baartman and the pseudo-scientific invasion into Black women's bodies which continues after 250 years. The inclusion of a gender 'expert' and a psychologist is tantamount to pathologizing Ms Semenya and all women who do not fit the diminutive stereotype of women. The media no longer play an objective role but rather become the stokers of fire creating sensationalism through vicious innuendo. Meanwhile the audience becomes voyeurs of women's bodies with regards race and gender - in other words we are all Sara Baartman.

[_id=28082 Casting stones at Semenya] 16 Sep 2009 inThe Witness (South African newspaper)

In Parliament, Semenya has been compared with Sarah Baartman: paraded in a 19th-century circus until she tragically took her own life. In a fate possibly even worse, every detail of Semenya’s private life has been paraded on the world stage by sports officials, media and politicians keen to make a buck, a scoop or to score a few political points. It’s time to stop this modern day slavery.

"Dressing up, dressing down" by CHRISTI VAN DER WESTHUIZEN Sep 17 2009 in the Mail & Guardian

"ANC MP Peace Mabe's Saartjie Baartman comparison was apt. But Baartman and Semenya are not rendered spectacles only because they are black. Though 200 years apart, both cases demonstrate how women's bodies are scrutinised, regulated and sometimes violated, as opposed to men's."

SEMENYA’S GENDER: the right to be different in HSRC Review - Volume 7 - No. 3 - September 2009 Human Sciences Research Council (South Africa)

Semenya's story is making us question our principles, our tolerance of difference and the way in which our institutions define what is normal. This is a heavy burden for an 18-year-old to endure. The spotlight of curiosity shines as brightly and harshly on Semenya now as it did in the 19th century on Saartje Baartman's body. We are similarly interested in the state and shape of her genitals, in her non-normative body and in her wish to be herself.

Western sources

Caster Semenya row: 'Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl? It is racism' David Smith, The Observer, Sunday 23 August 2009

But although the debate is ostensibly about sex, many in South Africa believe it has a racial dimension. Political leaders have accused Western "imperialists" of a public lynching, comparing her case to that of Saartjie Baartman, an 18th-century Khosian woman who paraded naked in Europe for colonialists to prod her genitals with their umbrellas.

South African Angst New York Times op-ed By MARK GEVISSER 2 September 2009

As the outrage grew in South Africa last month around the treatment of the athlete Caster Semenya by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the name of another young black South African woman was repeatedly mentioned: Sarah Baartman.

Ms. Semenya is the masculine-looking 18-year-old runner who won in the 800-meter at the recent World Athletics Championships in Berlin but had her medal withheld subject to sex-verification testing. Humiliated, she returned home a hero, with thousands greeting her at the Johannesburg airport, and with leaders ranging from Winnie Mandela to President Jacob Zuma clamoring to defend her.

Baartman was the “Hottentot Venus” of the early 19th century, a singer and dancer of the Khoi people who was born into slavery and brought over to Europe by impressarios who put her on public display because of her unusually large buttocks and genitals. After she died at the age of 25 her body was dissected displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; her remains were repatriated to South Africa in 2002. Today, she has become an icon in South Africa of the way colonialism dehumanized black people and pathologized black sexuality.

The way Ms. Semenya’s humiliation evoked Baartman’s offers fascinating insight into South Africa’s defensive self-image, and how the country projects itself in the world. It tells us much about how, in the shadow of a turbulent past, South Africans aspire toward the diversity, tolerance and dignity laid out in their Constitution — and how distant the lives of many of them are from such aspirations.

The Curious Case of Caster Semenya 11 Sept 2009 By Pamela Scully & Clifton Crais. The blog of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The decision by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) to investigate the gender of South African runner Caster Semenya has resulted in numerous editorials, blogs and discussions in which the IAAF’s examination of Semenya’s body and sexuality have been compared to the sufferings endured by Sara Baartman, the 19th century South African woman better known in Europe and the USA as the “Hottentot Venus.”

Do the parallels drawn to Sara Baartman’s experience help explain the experience of Caster Semenya, who a South African magazine has recently clothed in fashionable garments and jewelry presumably to appear as stereotypically “female”?

Or do such analogies reproduce the continued invocation of the “Hottentot Venus” as the figure who we never allow to rest, but who is always hovering ghost-like in discussions of race and sexuality?

Caster Semenya 21st century 'Hottentot Venus'? New African, Nov 2009 by Carina Ray

The disgraceful treatment of Caster Semenya is eerily familiar to that of another South African woman: Saartjie Baartman.

Caster Semenya kept under wraps as she awaits IAAF's gender ruling By Oliver Brown, in Ga-Masehlong, South Africa 3 Dec 2009 in The Telegraph.

But Semenya's supporters go further, alleging that she is being not simply reclassified, but dehumanised. Parallels have been drawn with the tragic 19th-century figure of Saartjie Baartman, an orphan from Eastern Cape whose anatomy fascinated the European colonisers, and who is reputed to have died a prostitute in France in her mid-twenties after being ogled by a variety of painters and naturalists. Until 1974 her preserved remains were displayed at the Musée de l'Homme, in Paris, and the treatment of Semenya has given rise to an uncomfortable suspicion in South Africa that a black body is again being analysed as separate to that of a human.

Caster Semenya in "Times Topics" in the New York Times Tuesday, February 9, 2010.

The inquiry has angered many South Africans, who compare Ms. Semenya's plight to that of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman taken to Europe in the early 19th century and exhibited like a wild beast under the name Hottentot Venus. Scientists scrutinized her genitals.

Synthesis

The issue has become politicised, with Julius Malema, head of the African National Congress Youth League, dismissed those who wrote against Semenya as "foreign-owned media". Butana Komphela, the chairman of parliament’s sports portfolio committee, tried to block Lamine Diack, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, from visiting President Jacob Zuma, unless he apologised for the IAAF's treatment of Semenya. Another ANC MP, Peace Mabe, Chair of the Committee on Women, Children and People wih Disabilities , the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, and other African cultural commentators compared Semenya's case to that of Saartjie Baartman. Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, was an 18th century Khoisan woman who was brought to Europe and exhibited for her sexual differences and who, in the past decade, "has become an icon in South Africa of the way colonialism dehumanized black people and pathologized black sexuality".

Attention has been drawn to the comparison by South African publications and organisations such as Mahala, the The Sunday Times, and The Witness, and Western ones such as the New York Times, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, The Telegraph, The Observer, and the London-based New African.