by Olivia Burton
Abstract
In South Africa, the existing system continues to preserve unequal gendered citizenship rights based on colonial and apartheid hierarchies. Despite a rightsbased legal platform, the state reproduces racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy, creating a multitude of vulnerabilities for Black migrant women. The COVID19 pandemic and related restrictions have deepened global inequality, heightening the vulnerabilities experienced by the most marginalised people in society. This has been seen in governments’ pandemic responses around the world, which prioritised exclusion over solidarity—South Africa being a prime example. Through qualitative interviews with migrant women living in Cape Town and using an intersectional and feminist approach, this research evaluates the effects of the South African government’s response to COVID19, uncovering how it has exacerbated pre-existing structural inequality and violence. Despite pronounced precarity wrought by the response, the findings reveal that experiences of vulnerability were nothing new to the participants. Rather, their experiences of exclusion constitute continuity of the existing system, which systematically (re)produces racialised and gendered access to citizenship. Through this investigation, I reveal how the experiences of migrant women are symptomatic of the enduring coloniality of citizenship in South Africa, which has institutionalised their exclusion from citizenship.
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Feature-2_Coloniality-of-Citizenship