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

The rise of neoliberalism in post-colonial contexts such as Brazil, Nigeria, India or South Africa, has meshed with legacies of colonialism and 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 to aspiration and mobility on the other, fails to capture the notably different experiences among women of such transitions. In this article we employ an intersectional analytical lens, focusing on South Africa to ask the question of 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 globally most progressive legislation on gendered violence, 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 neighbourhoods, 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 privatised security. By retreating from making demands on the state women who should, in theory, benefit from economic empowerment under market liberalization are in fact rendered doubly vulnerable through the intersectional experience of being Black and middle class.