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

In South Africa, everyday violence shapes and is shapedby a historically grounded enmeshment of gendered,racialised, and classed inequities, or what María Lugonesreferred to as the coloniality of gender. In contributing toscholarship on the coloniality of gender in South Africa, weconducted focus group discussions and individual interviewsin two marginalised South African communities. Researchparticipants highlighted how patriarchal social relationsstructure quotidian life. Specifically, they described howviolence is used to reify masculinised identities (e.g., thatof the breadwinner) and to ‘protect’ women from otherviolent men. Several participants interrogated the genderedsystems of meaning that are normatively attached to suchviolence. By examining the discursive interplay of violence,gender, and impoverishment in the data, we conclude byconsidering how the coloniality of gender works to entrenchhierarchical social ordering in contemporary South Africa.Accordingly, we advocate for structural and political changeover individualising interventions.