Claiming Spaces, Changing Places: Political Violence and Women's Protests in KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

This paper examines the connections between the public and the private sphere through a case study of political protests by women in Mpumalanga Township, KwaZulu-Natal. The paper begins by reflecting on the public/private dichotomy and argues that the concepts of public and private seem to suggest a rigid set of socio-spatial practices, as if particular places have fixed social relationships and boundaries. It proposes a conceptual framework which focuses on the sites where women challenge the dominant power relations, rather than a simple public/private dichotomy; this conceptualization illuminates the reformulation of gender power relations across a variety of spaces. A key theoretical argument which is explored empirically is that challenges to power relations in one space reformulate subjectivities and so impact on power relations in another site. The paper then goes on to examine how space was constructed in Mpumalanga township prior to the violence and then the way in which political violence reconstructed this space (in particular, it focuses on the schools, the streets and domestic space). The paper then moves on to examine how women, through protests of different kinds, challenged the way in which these spaces and their accompanying gendered power relations had been reconstructed by the violence. The final section of the paper examines whether and how gender relations in the household have changed as a result of these processes.