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Race, Culture, and Identity

Feminist Praxis, Citizenship and Informal Politics: Reflections on South Africa's Anti-Eviction Campaign

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This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa,
which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged
township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and
service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and
invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning
those. The article also sheds light on the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how
its patriarchal order is being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering
feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and informal
arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in constructing yet another binary
relation between grassroots coping strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies
(in invented spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists’ extended
notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the poor in order to construct
an inclusive citizenship. It argues that doing so better reflects the practices of
the grassroots and furthers a progressive feminist praxis.

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Number of Pages
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ISBN
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Language
English
ISSN
1461-6742
Subject(s)
South Africa
Grassroots
Citizenship
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Article
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