The ‘Women Question’ remains, arguably, the most unresolved in the history of democratic thought and practice in South Africa. In tracing the articulations of this question through the twentieth century and into the period of democracy it is evident that the dominant narratives of nationalist and class struggle relegated the demands for a society free of gender domination to a secondary status both in intellectual reasoning and in political projects. Although women were always participants in politics, it was only in moments of extraordinary mobilisation by women themselves that advances were made in defining an agenda for a good and just society in ways that referenced the particular, often-invisible conditions needed to liberate women. Indeed, the very idea of women's liberation was postponed to an indefinite future.

The subject of this discussion – women – is not definable without reference to a range of other markers such as class, ethnicity and race. The cultural meanings of ‘woman’ shift in relation to these markers of identity, and work in tandem with the ways in which capitalism mobilises ideologies of gender to normalise systems of economic exploitation. Although some women's movements, and some forms of feminism, have identified the elimination of patriarchy as the common interest of all women, patriarchy itself cannot be understood in ahistorical terms as separate from capitalism. Postcolonial feminists have argued that the ideological content of feminist consciousness should not be specified a priori according to abstract definitions. The archive of feminism, they argue, presents itself as universal but is indelibly marked by the specific historical trajectories of Western colonial-capitalist development. In this chapter, I therefore follow Chandra Mohanty's (1991) advice and attempt to offer a discussion of women's struggles that is set not against a prescriptive test of ideological conformity but, rather, within the specific historical experience and political culture of South Africa. I suggest that as a working, open-ended definition feminism is the project of examining the particular ways in which power operates between the political, economic and social spheres. It is the complex interaction between these spheres that reveals how gender works to mark power and resource distributions.

Introduction

The emergence of a global political movement agitating for the adoption of gender quotas – what Drude Dahlerup (2005) has described as a “quota fever” – has reinvigorated feminist theorization of representation. The fundamental questions of representation have been posed again: who do elected officials represent; does increased representation improve marginalized groups' access to decision-making institutions; and under what conditions does increased representation lead to improved policy outcomes for marginal groups? Two sorts of disillusionment have coincided in global political discussions about women and representation. On the one hand, feminists in older democracies despair about the slow progress of women in elected bodies. On the other, in new democracies, feminists are skeptical of the willingness of pro-democracy movements to effectively address the interests of women. A remarkable consensus has been forged between these two groups in favor of new mechanisms to increase women's representation, most notably the use of some form of gender quota.

Debates on quotas have advanced in two distinctive phases thus far. In the first phase, feminists were concerned with justifying the idea that special mechanisms were needed to redress the democratic deficit in representation. Most opponents of quotas do indeed focus on normative liberal objections, whether these relate to the relative privileges of groups over individuals, or the value of equal opportunities, or the relative weight of women's claims over those of other groups.

On the evening of Sunday, 11 May 2008, a gang of young men in Johannesburg's Alexandra township forced their way into a hostel on London Road and initiated a merciless attack on residents they deemed to be ‘foreigners’. From this spark, the murder, rape, and looting directed at the bodies and belongings of non-South Africans had spread within days from Alex to informal settlements in Diepsloot and the East Rand, where a Mozambican man, Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuavhe, was burned alive while bystanders laughed. Soon thereafter, similar attacks began to unfold in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern and Western Cape. South African citizens speaking the ‘wrong’ languages – XiTsonga or SiPedi, for example – were also subjected to violent assault. By the time the violence subsided in early June, some 62 people had died – a third of them South African. Hundreds had suffered grievous injuries and tens of thousands had been displaced from their homes, taking shelter in community halls and police stations, or fleeing in terror across the borders in anticipation of an uncertain future.

AN ANXIOUS RESPONSE

Every instance of large-scale civilian violence towards the innocent provokes a response from those not immediately touched by it. Yet in the catalogue of human brutality unfolding daily around the world, 62 murders over a period of three weeks seems barely worth notice. How many times, over the past five years, have roughly that number of bodies been torn apart by a single bomb in a crowded market in Basra or Baghdad? In a blood-soaked, mediatised world, everyday ethnic or religious violence – much less organised warfare – evokes little more than indifference from the jaded audiences of CNN and BBC World.

Yet the South African story clearly struck a nerve, arousing moral outrage on a global scale: ‘The world watched in shock as a wave of xenophobic violence engulfed South Africa,’ wrote a journalist for Spiegel International Online in an article that bore the title ‘South Africa disgusted with itself’. Had the dream of democratic redemption and reconciliation embodied in the saintly figure of Nelson Mandela reverted to the nightmare of internecine hatred and warfare? Had the daring declaration in South Africa's pioneering Constitution – ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ – been dismissed with contempt by the chanting of xenophobic slogans and the flourishing of machetes?