Legal scholars have considered the confluence of law, space and sexuality. What is less visible is a focus on the connections between women and apartheid geography. This contribution explores those connections with particular reference to the Group Areas Act 41 of 1950 and argues that the latter made use of racialisation and the control of their movement to use women as spatial markers. Drawing on feminist geography, this contribution unpacks the role of gender in the production of space and the manner in which space is complicit in the constitution of gender to explore the inscription of space on women’s bodies. It then considers the inscription of space on women’s bodies as the producers of populations, which must be understood as “racialised”, to (re)produce segregation. Furthermore, this study considers the role of gender in the production of race and the role of race in the construction of varying iterations of gender in the context of Afrikaner nationalism. By unpacking the concepts of the volk and the volksmoeder, this contribution illustrates how the usurpation of white womanhood and motherhood, as tools of Afrikaner nationalism, were instrumental in the formation of apartheid and its geography. This, in turn, had a devastating impact on black women. This contribution also looks at the manner in which women were affected by apartheid legislation that made their bodies the site of segregatory and apartheid geography. It is argued that women became a primary means by which the Group Areas Act demarcated race. This, together with the manner in which that Act controlled the movement of women, meant that women became the signifiers of space. It is submitted that women were used to (re)produce urban areas, townships and homelands.
Nosipho Salazi Goba (Wed,) studied this question.