Abstract
This thesis is situated within debates about the intersection between identity, gender and transmigration that are on the rise in the South-South context. Using a feminist research approach nested within qualitative methodology, the thesis focuses on the experiences of Zimbabwean women who live in the City of Johannesburg with precarious immigration legal status. The thesis argues that the working-class, transmigrant women navigate Johannesburg in ways that reveal colonial, spatial injustices that Black South Africans are already experiencing. This includes grappling with the legacies of colonial, border regimes (concrete and metaphorical) and social exclusion in labour/work; accommodation; access to public health institutions; cost of living crisis; remittances; experiences with GBV, structural violence such xenophobia, being arrested, detained, and deported. However, because of their ‘irregular’ legal status, Zimbabwean transmigrant women narrated from semi-structured interviews that they negotiated everyday life in ‘gendered spaces’. As a result, the women face additional intersecting layers of social exclusion that are embedded in historical, social structures that prompt ‘feminisation of migration’. The impact of ‘irregular personhood’ that is inscribed in the identities of working-class, transmigrant women means that they experience violence at all stages of the migration value-chain. An illumination of South-South gendered migratory trajectories is timely and crucially arises out of practices by androcentric state definitions of belonging/unbelonging to the nation-state as a project that are fundamentally gender/race/class project through somatocentric policy and migration governance. A key finding in the thesis is that what prompts women to migrate from Zimbabwe especially from the Matabeleland provinces is largely economic but can also be linked to violent post-independent nation-building projects that led to Gukurahundi genocide. The thesis argues that this violence lingers socially with the phenomenon of ‘Missing/Absent Fathers’ that is being filled by the transmigrant women themselves when they play double-roles and by other actors known as oMalayitsha. The interactions and modalities of community that arise from these social relations indicate non-normative family arrangements and non-White sociality that showed how women empathise with transmigrant Zimbabwean men and their struggles in Johannesburg therefore humanising them and demonstrating the fluidity of the performativity of gender. This analysis moves beyond the narratives of Zimbabwean working-class women Johannesburg society that binarily characterize them as either ‘victims’ or ‘victors’ without adequate engagement of the importance of gender regimes in an African context as relational. This arises from the fact that dominant analyses in transmigrant research are rooted in economic, push-pull and top-down approaches which, in this thesis, are substituted with an eclectic theoretical approach anchored on intersectionality, decolonial feminism and the reflexive turn in migration research. The thesis concludes, in part, that transmigrant Zimbabwean women’s life experiences in South Africa create gender and discourses about power and space-making that needlessly create worry, violence, and anxiety for transmigrant working-class women in South Africa. South Africa has policy options that it can adopt to address these challenges and is tied to serious attempts at bilateral and regional levels to regularise the stay of marginal transmigrants and to protect them in terms of labour exploitation and other forms of violence.