Persistent pasts, present struggles, imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid

Abstract

Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In this paper we focus on two avenues that have engaged scholars since the end of apartheid, namely: gender and development; and gender and geographies of sexualities. The former articulates the particular ways that the historical spatially exclusionary trajectory of the country has impacted especially on women and their ability to engage with state and national building projects post-apartheid. The latter explores how South African geographies (despite the country’s progressive post-apartheid constitution with regard to LGBT rights) continue to reflect and (at times) enable spatial segregation and inequalities related to gender. A key strength of research in South African gender scholarship is that it complicates and challenges how we might approach gender and gender-based inequalities, and the diverse ways in which gender categories and framings can be imagined, deployed and troubled in post-colonial states and cities.

Keywords:

• Development
• gender
• post-colonial
• race
• sexuality
• south Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Oldfield

Sophie Oldfield is the University of Cape Town and University of Basel Professor in Urban Studies, based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and in the Department of Social Science at University of Basel. Her research focuses on informality and governance, and urban politics. She has a track-record of excellence in collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between ‘university’ and ‘community’. Commitment to this collaborative approach lies at the heart of her research and writing on cities of the global south.

Andrew Tucker

Andrew Tucker is the Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities. Tucker completed his PhD at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge in 2006. He has extensive experience working to understand and address inequality in a variety of forms across Africa. His work has explored how social markers such as race, sexuality and gender relate to the urban environment. This work has also examined how such relationships must be taken into account in health programmes, with a particular focus on HIV prevention, treatment and care.