Women and negotiated forms of belonging in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Although post-apartheid South Africa has seemingly opened its doors, its immigration and migration policies are ‘increasingly characterized by powerful xenophobic and exclusionary discourses centred on migration from the rest of Africa’ (Peberdy 2001, 16). The increase in xenophobic violent attacks and the extensive media coverage of these violent spurts has shifted the public discourse from exploring the different manifestations of xenophobia to an emphasis on a specific segment of the population which is primarily male and living in the townships. In both research and public discourse, the dominant discourse of xenophobia as male violence negates psychological and other mental forms of violence and xenophobia against women. Focusing on the experiences of women from other African countries and local women partnered with African non-nationals this article aims to provide counterpoints to this picture. It does so by understanding the negligence of women’s experiences within a framework of body politics and nationalism in which female bodies tend to be constructed as the authentic, inner country whose purity, sexuality, and traditional roles must be secured (Baines 2003, “Body politics and the Rwandan crisis.” Third World Quarterly 24 (3): 479–493, 482). It argues that the nation-building project as imagined by South African society constructs insiders and outsiders at the detriment of the vulnerable and minority groups in society (non-nationals and citizens alike) in a highly gendered manner. By looking at different ways in which women are positioned in the post-apartheid national building project, the article asks what forms of subjectivities and belonging are negotiated and enacted in response to these positionings. It shows how the experience of being a non-national is not fixed but becomes differently articulated during specific moments. Similarly, forms of belonging also depend on the context in which women find themselves in, thereby generating contingent political subjectivities.