Ghost girls and sponsorbabes: dystopian performances of white femininity in Lauren Beukes's Moxyland

Abstract

The overdetermined visibility of white South African women's bodies and their positioning, historically, as the object of visual pleasure and a “sexy” reinforcer of white privilege suggests that looking relations are powerfully linked with how post-apartheid whiteness is gendered. Given the visibility particular to South African whiteness, I argue that the young white female subject's body becomes a site that mediates hegemonic whiteness and interrogates white privilege through her now-precarious role as a “star” for the gaze of the dominant culture. One text that problematizes how young white women's bodies are looked at in the post-apartheid cultural landscape is Lauren Beukes's recent novel, Moxyland. Set in the Cape Town of 2018 and featuring a ‘corporate apartheid’ government that disciplines with an effortlessly casual chic, Beukes's speculative text highlights how the hegemonic power of whiteness maintains itself through a rigorous self-normalised body practices and gendered commodification, with a heightened emphasis on visuality. Kendra Adams is a photographer who has recently agreed to be implanted with nanotechnology that will keep her youthful skin smooth and “improved” in exchange for branding herself permanently as a “hipster” advertisement for the sports drink, Ghost. Through Kendra's attempts to document the process of becoming a “Ghost Girl” juxtaposed with the multi-media manipulation of her image, Beukes deftly limns how the micropolitics of female embodiment is linked with the “global flow” of whiteness.