Caster Semenya running the 800-metre race at the world championships in Berlin. Creative Commons photo by José Sena Goulão/LUSA .

The treatment of Caster Semenya is a disgrace. The 18 year-old South African runner, who is currently the object of “gender verification testing” after winning the world championship 800-meter race in August, has had her most private medical details paraded before the international press in what can only be described as an exceptionally ugly episode of gender panic. Last Friday, Australia’s Daily Telegraph cited an anonymous source claiming to have the results of the “gender test,” and then early this week came word that Semenya has gone into hiding to escape the uproar, was receiving counseling for the ordeal, and one source—again, anonymous—said she was in fact on suicide watch. Some of the media hubbub about the case has been merely embarrassing; some has been hideously offensive; but all of it has been undignified.

This sickening feeding frenzy has got to stop, and heads better roll at the International Association of Athletics Federations, the obvious source of the leaked results (genuine or not). At the moment, the IAAF has refused to confirm or deny the Telegraph report. The confidentiality of medical records is simply a cardinal rule, and to break that confidence is not just hurtful, it can be dangerous (If people don’t trust their doctors to treat that information seriously, they fail to disclose medical details and lives are put at risk). Yesterday, South Africa lodged a complaint with the United Nations over Semenya’s treatment at the hands of the IAAF and their squad of ovary police. It’s possible to have a (long-overdue) conversation about gender, sport, science, and modern medicine, and the collision course these disciplines find themselves on. We don’t have to destroy some poor teenager’s life to do so.

There are two significant things to note about District 9. First, the hypermodern you-are-there visual style, clearly influenced by CNN, reality TV, embedded reporting, and the other techniques that have characterized the “War on Terror” aesthetic. This same kind of shaky camera work, complete with documentary-style zoom lenses, harsh lighting, and choppy focus-pulling, was the hallmark of another recent grim science-fiction series and clear 9/11 fable, Battlestar Galactica.

The second and more important thing about this movie is its setting and context, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The director, Neill Blomkamp, has adapted this feature from a short film he made, Alive in Joburg, about alien refugees living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps and shantytowns around South Africa’s largest city. The racial overtones at work here are pretty obvious (science fiction has been making hay out of racial metaphors since the beginning) but the specific location here—post-apartheid South Africa; a continent struggling to cope with massive flows of migrants, within and across borders; booming exurban slums—is particularly contemporary. (Klaatu and Gort clambering out of their spaceship onto the White House lawn this ain’t.) In the original short film, there’s an explicit political connection to the apartheid government and the racial divides that defined the country for decades. Can that message survive the transition to a mainstream feature co-financed by Sony/Tristar? Even if the overt political message is diluted, there’s still an implicit one in setting this story in Johannesburg, away from obvious trappings of Western political, economic, cultural and military domination. In a culture where non-westerners are usually depicted as either helpless, expendable, irrelevant, villainous, or hopelessly sentimentalized, this flips the perspective and makes them the centre of the action. That’s not an insignificant achievement for a big Hollywood science-fiction movie.

Engler’s book sheds light on several of the skeletons harbored in the closet of Canada’s foreign relations record. While the book may be an alternative to the political posturing of our government–and much of the mainstream media’s slanted coverage–it may also be a difficult pill for wool-eyed idealists to swallow.

Canada is often seen as—to quote Salutin—the “backwaters of empire,” an innocent bystander to the bullying tactics of the nation’s southern neighbours. Engler points out that while nearly nine out of ten Canadians view this country as a benevolent force in the world, the truth isn’t always so kind. Engler’s book draws attention to some lesser known fragments of Canada’s diplomatic past and present: its undermining of the democratically elected Aristide government in Haiti; its role in overthrowing Salvador Allende and subsequent support of the Pinochet regime in Chile; piggybacking on Uncle Sam in the Middle East and even supporting South African Apartheid.

At his book’s launch, Engler spoke of the ideal Canada—one  whose foreign policy initiatives would be centered upon being good neighbours as opposed to self-interest. While Engler insists that he is not an expert in foreign policy he points out that, as a journalist, “informing citizens about what their governments, corporations and other institutions are doing is a central task.” Engler writes: “The goal of this book is to reveal a side of international relations that our governments and corporations have kept hidden from the vast majority of us. This black book, unlike a secret list of girlfriends kept by a lothario, has a progressive purpose: To inspire Canadians to demand change.”