Urbani izziv Volume 30, No. supplement, February 2019
: 37-51
(Articles)
doi: 10.5379/urbani-izziv-en-2019-30-supplement-003
Author
Sophie OLDFIELD
African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa and Urban Studies, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
sophie.oldfield@uct.ac.za and sophie.oldfield@unibas.ch
Netsai Sarah MATSHAKA
Independent Researcher, Johannesburg, South Africa
smatshaka@gmail.com
Elaine SALO
Department of Political Studies, University of Delaware, United States
deceased, August 2016
Ann SCHLYTER
School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (retired)
ann.schylter@gmail.com
Title
In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities
Abstract
How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the
peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation
of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects,
the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the
second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities
embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our
analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive
relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on
debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that
citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian
activities in homes and everyday city contexts.
Key Words
gender, citizenship, cities, urban peripheries, Southern Africa