Black women’s filicidal rage in zones of impoverishment

Visual and written accounts of rage in popular media tend to associate rage with violent masculinities.Footnote1 Filicide brings women's rage into sharp relief. By reading South African women in relation to their ancestral peer, Sila van den Kaap and through a 'black deformative' analysis of media accounts and an interview of filicide in South Africa, this paper asserts that black women have ample cause for rage. Filicide brings the purportedly personal into public light and compels a response. Although the response tends to pathologise filicidal women, it calls attention to the conditions of impoverishment that black women live under. The paper suggests that filicidal women's refusal of the conditions of mothering, may also be an enactment of a strike against gendered scripts of care. Their own subsequent suicide might simultaneously be read as an opting out and as reaching for freedom beyond the interdiction of impoverishment. The findings suggest that rage is a crucial action-oriented affect in the expression and striving for black freedoms of which women are always core protagonists.