Buying Safety: Neoliberalism, Gendered Violence, and the Everyday State in South Africa

The rise of neoliberalism in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil, Nigeria, India, and South Africa has meshed with the legacies of colonialism and the deep social inequalities of race, class, and gender to create paradoxical gendered effects. A singular narrative of oppression and inequality, on the one hand, counterposed with aspiration and mobility, on the other, fails to capture the notably different experiences among women during such transitions. In this article we employ an intersectional analytical lens, focusing on South Africa, to ask how and why Black middle-class women have experienced new vulnerabilities, inequalities, and forms of gendered violence in the context of the post-apartheid transition. Even though the post-apartheid South African state instituted some of the most progressive legislation on gendered violence globally, and a section of Black women have experienced substantial upward mobility through a combination of state and market policies, paradoxically, as our research shows, their class position creates a particular vulnerability. In the context of state retreat from middle-class neighborhoods, women are encouraged to “buy their safety” and project middle-class respectability. Perceived as rich women with “rich women’s problems,” they are encouraged to confine themselves to the private spheres of consumption, therapy, and privatized security. By retreating from making demands on the state, women who should, in theory, benefit from economic empowerment under market liberalization are rendered, in fact, doubly vulnerable through the intersectional experience of being Black and middle class.