“She doesn't look like she is both mother and father”: Disrupting the child/parent binary

Abstract

abstract This focus interrogates the parent/child binary within a context of poverty, more specifically in a case where a girl lives with her parents. The protagonist is a young South African girl of Indian origin living in a suburb close to the city of Durban in South Africa. Leela and her family live in a wood and iron shack without running water and electricity. She was born when her parents were children (her mother 12 and her father 15 years old). Now aged 13, she has taken over the running of the household and care of her siblings since her mother is unwell and her abusive father is unemployed. Leela's story reveals the hardships of living in an intergenerational family structure, and highlights the fragility of the categories of ‘child’ and ‘parent’ when parent and child roles are reversed and subverted.