ABSTRACT
Ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa, the national and international media reported that sex workers were about to “flood” the country. This prognosis seems to be a recurring, global phenomenon. As mega events, major sporting events seem to precipitate attention to the issue of sex work, especially within media discourses. However, since a decrease in the demand for sexual services was actually reported afterwards, one could assume that this prognosis is a politically exploitable, discursive media-event with no empirical reality. This observation shall serve as the starting point of the discourse analysis I will present in this chapter.
By combining Constructivist Grounded Theory and SKAD, as suggested by Keller and Truschkat Keller (2012), and based on my analysis of data samples of 221 articles from 55 South African daily and weekly newspapers during 2010, I aim to uncover the constructions of the subject positions of sex workers in the South African media discourses around the FIFA World Cup 2010. Drawing on queer, postcolonial and intersectional theories, I argue that there are three dominant subject positions through which sex workers are manifested in the media discourse to be analysed: The “magosha” (“whore”), the “victim” and the “mother”. By focusing on the debate within the South African context, I shift the centre of analysis to the Global South and interpret the gendered and sexualised positions of the sex workers by centralising the particular societal context out of which they emerged.
