Barking up the wrong tree?

Male hegemony, discrimination against
women and the reporting of bestiality in
the Zimbabwean press

 

          Foucault believes that a discourse could be an “instrument of power or an effect of power,” as well as “a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy”. Societal discourse mediates its power and control through institutions and elites “who are charged with saying what counts as true”.

Certainly, discourse has a great significance and power and when in the elite’s hands or the people who possess the instruments of production are much more powerful. Taking the most prominent example throughout history which is the master slave relationship or the white and black relationship in which the people of color are denigrated and deprived from their human rights through the white’s discourse. The white was holding, and still for some extent, a vantage point of view from which they describe and give what is believed to be facts about other none white people because of their whiteness, the problem is that those facts and discourses were believed to be the truth only because a white man who said that. And from here we can say that through discourse (words and texts) the white was creating the blacks’ social reality in which they are prescribed as slaves, and their mission in life is to serve the whites. Before that, during the discovering of Africa anthropologists were looking at the Africans’ civilization as primitive and even none human but animalistic. They were using a discourse in which they legitimate their occupation of the lands and take slaves to enhance their economic growth.

The example tackled in the chapter is the most solicited one, it shows how black women were treated and how they were paid to do such bad things and have intercourse with animals to fulfill the white (disgusting) desire to spread rumors and create new social reality for them as diseases holders and animalistic bitches.