ABSTRACT
The headline ran all the way across the upper fold of the daily newspaper in large bold print: “‘Watch me kill a moffie’”, inviting readers into the discursive re-enactment of a murder. 1 It is in this invitation to kill that the boundaries between when and by whom violence is done become blurred. The text’s beckoning towards the killing of a ‘moffie’, a pejorative term for a gay man, is a discursive violence enacted in the present, which, in its moment of inauguration in the text, invokes a material violence of the past. How does this (re)imagining of a killing constitute the discursive conditions for it to materialise in the present and to have taken place in the past? In what ways are both the deed and the prospect of killing done, and redone, through this performative re-enactment?
