The Everyday Violence of Gendered Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa

In South Africa, everyday violence shapes and is shaped by patriarchal masculinities in ways that have been inadequately explored in the research literature. In order to better understand this relationship, we conducted focus group discussions and individual interviews in two South Africa communities, both of which are indexed as “low income” and “high crime”, and have low rates of municipal service delivery. Research participants highlighted how patriarchal social relations structure quotidian life, and how women’s vulnerability oftentimes serves as the basis for reproducing cycles of everyday violence in their communities. More specifically, participants described how violence is used to reify masculinised identities (e.g., that of the breadwinner) and to ‘protect’ women from other violent men. Several participants noted that because such violence offered women basic securities, women were partially responsible for reproducing violence in their communities. By focusing on the relationship between violence, gender, and impoverishment, we conclude by considering how the coloniality of gender works to fix hierarchical social ordering in contemporary South Africa.