Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies (review)

A hybrid place, South Africa has received growing attention from the outside world since coming out of apartheid in 1994; the country is now striving to inscribe itself into a radically more global network.

In this lucid, revealing, and explanatory study of the complexities of modern South African society and politics, Glen S. Elder examines the links among racism, gender inequality, and sexual oppression in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on comparisons between apartheid and postapartheid South Africa, Elder attempts to trace the sexual oppression of women through the South African political landscape and decode apartheid's psychosocial and socioeconomic realities through the study of gendered spaces and what he calls "heterosexual codings."

Elder cleverly exposes how South African apartheid politics and social discourse pervasively contributed to the mapping of desires and procreational roles in a heavily sexualized heteropatriarchal context. Despite recent political changes in South Africa, policy thinking is still limited by the former apartheid ghosts of highly heterosexualized social geographies, Elder argues, from which the housing shortage and HIV/AIDS crisis directly result.

Elder's study concentrates on hostels established by municipalities to house local male labor and focuses on the sexed and gendered dimension of these small-scale municipal hostels, where women were not admitted as residents during apartheid. Elder explains how women were "maternalized" and expected to become part of the then typical normatized rural black household, first as daughters, then as mothers. So-called deviant subjects and other women unwilling to fit within the boundaries of the established heteropatriarchal matrix were severely punished and often brutalized. Victims of sex crimes were mostly regarded as deserving of their fate (viewed by most as a just punishment) for being in a space where they did not belong.

Rendered passive by an oppressive apartheid system in which identities were acutely policed, women were seldom granted a subjectivity of their own. In his book, Elder gives some of these women a voice by means of a series of interviews with thirty migrant females living in an East Rand hostel in Kwa Thema (near Johannesburg). His thesis is supported not only by these women's testimonies but also by interviews with hostel and community leaders, and by an extensive survey of local newspaper articles.

Providing historical background, Elder explains how Kwa Thema, a township located in Gauteng (one of South Africa's postapartheid new provinces), was originally built in the early 1950s to segregate and house black labor from the nearby white city of Springs. Located east of Johannesburg, Kwa Thema is also one of the most economically powerful provinces in contemporary South Africa. Between 1985 and 1990, migrants and refugees from the war-torn KwaZulu-Natal midlands (Zulus) flocked to Kwa Thema. But a terrible housing shortage forced most of them to move into hostels already occupied by longtime Kwa Thema residents. Severe tensions arose, and ethnic violence and staggering crime rates riddled the hostels and their surroundings. Elder depicts the situation in utterly disturbing terms: "Inside the hostel lives a community under siege. Because men and women hostel dwellers find themselves living at odds with many in their surrounding community, they are often scared to venture outside the hostel boundaries" (33).

In the mid- to late 1980s, a shift occurred with the official abolition of influx control and the removal of restrictions on the physical movement of black household members. To supplement their husbands' earnings, female family members were forced to transgress the heteronormative family patterns modeled by the apartheid system and embark on various strategies to support their households. As a result, women started moving to urban areas and occupying hostels, breaking the rules of a secular heteropatriarchal social system and compromising the politics of a compulsory heterosexuality. Hostels reflected the symbolic and actual sexualization of space, reproducing the gendered rules of heteropatriarchy that apartheid had set in place and that were publicly and generally accepted as the norm. The movement of women from rural areas into hostels constituted a powerful...