In Search of Privacy, or When is the State Democratic?

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Periodical article

Title:	In Search of Privacy, or When is the State Democratic?
Author:	Chipkin, Ivor
Year:	2006
Periodical:	Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa
Issue:	61
Pages:	89-107
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	family law human rights homosexuality sovereignty Law, Human Rights and Violence Politics and Government
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transformation/v061/61.1chipkin.pdf
Abstract:	Based on legislation on sexual orientation, this paper compares the public/private spheres under apartheid and in democratic South Africa. It concludes that, from the perspective of the Constitution, South Africans today are chiefly citizens, that is, bearers of rights and duties irrespective of race, religion, sexuality. In other words, the State is no longer defined relative to a racial and/or sexual substance. Sovereignty no longer depends on safeguarding the racial/sexual integrity of the body politic. It is why the democratic State is able to self-limit in all those instances that the apartheid State could not. Instead, the democratic State is sovereign to the extent that it defends the integrity of the polis as a body of citizens - rights-bearing individuals. Democratic sovereignty is the sovereignty of the citizen. Apartheid sovereignty was that of the nation. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]