The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa

Jon Phillips,Saska Petrova

doi:10.1177/0308518x20986807

Abstract

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production.

Highlights

This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarious urban lives by analysing energy as a critical sphere of socio-ecological reproduction in South Africa
Energy has been a prominent feature of oppression and contestation (Macdonald, 2009; Mitchell, 2011) and the South African economy has historically depended on a system of accumulation distinctive in its exploitation of both energy and labour (Fine and Rustomjee, 1996)
We explore whether strategies that engage with material practices of social reproduction and contestation of the state create incentives to contest precarity

Summary

Introduction

We advance understanding of energy precarity as a politically induced, gendered, racialised and geographically uneven process that operates across multiple scales and through the spheres of energy production, distribution and consumption This approach draws on and complements energy vulnerability literature, which captures the dynamic exposure of individuals and households to energy deprivation, their sensitivity to the effects, and their adaptive capacity (Bouzarovski and Petrova, 2015; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015). Precarity provides insights on vulnerability as an outcome of political processes in and beyond the home that shape exposure to risk and harm – and as an axis of inequality rather than a universal condition This approach bridges a North-South binary within literature on energy deprivation or poverty. We analyse how precarity as oppositional politics may – but does not necessarily – challenge the socio-material order of gendered and racialised urban energy inequalities

Methods

Conclusion