Browsing by Author "Foster, D H"

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    A proposed typology for paedophilia: a grounded theory analysis of online discourse
    (2019) Verrijdt, Andrew; Foster, D H
    Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a human rights issue of interest to both science and society. Many CSA offenders are paedophiles. It follows that a thorough understanding of paedophilia is apposite. Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the literature about paedophilia. This may be because the group is not homogenous. To address this, studies have attempted to construct typologies. However, these suffered from methodological limitations including participant-dishonesty, difficulty in maintaining participant anonymity, small sample sizes and the tendency of clinicians to influence data. The current study attempts to address these. It examines a population of self-identified paedophiles who operated under a high degree of anonymity on a pair of websites (the “Pedophile Support Community”, and “Hurt 2 the Core”) that were hidden on the “dark internet” and accessible only via the anonymizing web browser “TOR”. The study qualitatively analyses participant discussions. Using the principles of grounded theory, it attempts to describe, compare and contrast the two sites’ users, with a view to identifying taxonomic distinctions. Most members of the first site used the platform to construct an identity, using cognitive distortions, that was more favourable to them than the one imposed by society. This was largely informed by the notion that child sexual abuse needn’t be harmful. Others eschewed child sexual abuse, preferring to satisfy their urges by viewing indecent images of children. These subtypes contrast to those who occupied the second site, who sought to enact both paedophilic and sadistic fantasies. The attitudes and actions of the sites' participants led to the construction of a proposed typology of potential child abusers. A distinction between ‘pedosexuals’ and ‘pedosadists’ is proposed. Whilst both are attracted to children, the latter is specifically aroused on the basis of violence (or thoughts of violence) against children, whilst the former explicitly is not. This distinction has implications for societal responses, vis a vis treatment, legal measures and theory.
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    Trans-corporeal bodybuilding: an exploration of the trans-corporeal relations between South African competitive male bodybuilders and their more-than-human world(s)
    (2019) Martin, Jarred H; Boonzaier, Floretta; Foster, D H
    The unique community of men’s organised competitive bodybuilding has long displayed a peculiar humanocentrism his/torically ingrained by a subcultural reliance on patriarchal, Cartesian, and Western tropes which discursively encode competitive male bodybuilders as the prototypical Hu/Man(ist) subject: disembodied and disembedded from the materiality of their bodies and their more-than-human world(s). This humanocentric bias has itself been reproduced in the taken-for-granted ways academic work on competitive male bodybuilders often reinscribes exclusionary and hierarchal relations between male bodybuilders’ subjectivities and their material bodies, as well as the more-than-human material agencies that are a necessity in the competitive building and gendered shaping of their muscle. In addressing this gap, this study adopted a feminist-inflected posthumanist approach to explore how the material agencies of South African competitive male bodybuilders’ muscle as well as their more-than-human world(s) co-participate in building their muscle, for the competitive stage. In doing so, the study drew on Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality: a radically relational (re)figuration of Hu/Man(ist) subjectivity and embodiment which (re)imagines the corporeal substance of “the human” as be(com)ing co-constituted through/with/across the material relations and forces of the more-than-human world. In this regard, the methodological work of this study demanded an ontoepistemological shift towards a posthumanist and post-qualitative research-assemblage which set in motion a series of exploratory (re)search(ing) practices, as part of which 30 male bodybuilders from South Africa generated autophotographs about how they competitively build their muscle. From photo-encounter sessions a relational and multi-sensory mode of thinking↔sensing↔working with the participating bodybuilders and their autophotographic material (e)merged in ways which performatively co-produced a far more capacious analytic through/with/across which a multitude of human and more-than-human agencies could be seen to intra-actively co-participate in the material↔discursive↔affective building and gendering of competitive male bodybuilders’ muscle. Ultimately, the study develops a new trans-corporeal mode of theorising competitive male bodybuilders, their muscle, and their muscle-building↔gendering practices which endeavours to more fully understand the more-than↔human relations which are always already at work in building and gendering the men and muscle at the gravitational centre of this peculiar subculture. In the world of men’s competitive bodybuilding, the matter of muscle is never simply human.