Abstract
This essay considers a specific reading, framed within feminist identity politics, of an excerpt from Zoë Wicomb’s novel-in-stories, You can’t get lost in Cape Town (1987). In the story titled ‘Behind the Bougainvillea’, the reader is faced with a particularly ambiguous sexual encounter between the protagonist, Frieda Shenton, and Henry Hendrikse, a man Frieda had in her youth been romantically involved with. One reading, positioned within popular feminist discourse, locates the encounter as sexual violence, and more specifically, rape. In attempting to offer an alternative understanding, this essay posits that the encounter is not one of sexual violence against Frieda, but instead should be viewed as an exchange, where she acts agentially in presenting her body as apology for discriminating against Henry on the basis of race in the past. This complicated exchange, as I shall discuss in the article, becomes possible only because gender, understood here as a relationship of unequal power between women and men, as well as material reality, exists.
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