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“Like Cock Pheasants in the Mating Season”: Englishmen in Scope Magazine, 26 August 1966

Since its invention, the camera has been complicit in gendering the western interest in “appearance”. This article examines the coupling of “looking” and masculinity by filling in certain gaps in South Africa’s media history. Scope began in the mid-sixties as a popular newsy or general interest magazine, before evolving into a Playboy-esque men’s magazine in the seventies. I analyze one issue of Scope from 1966, its first year of existence, as a synchronic snapshot of the popular articulation of masculine identity politics at this particular moment of South African history. I argue that at its inception, it was already focused on a male market and on the dual project of visualizing white masculinity and “whitening” the gaze of its readers. As such, it makes sense to examine race as integral to the practices of looking encouraged by Scope but even in a period of high-apartheid, I intend to show that there is no authentic (white) vernacular culture that is untouched by the culture of others, and in this instance, the culture of the Empire.