Abstract
M.A.
The private lives of women have been relatively neglected in scholarly literature on social movements and social protests. Scholars have a tendency of focusing primarily on the more pronounced and public face of protests instead of looking at how the public intersects with the more hidden private lives of protestors. Also, the concepts of the invited and invented spaces of participation have been discussed in relation to the public sphere, neglecting to look at the private lives of people, particularly those of women. Invited spaces are defined as “occupied by those grassroots actions and their allied non-governmental organisations that are legitimised by donors and government interventions” (Miraftab, 2006: 195). Invented spaces, on the other hand, are defined as “occupied by those collective actions by the poor that directly confront the authorities and challenge the status quo” (Miraftab, 2006: 195). It is necessary to look at the relationship between the invited and invented spaces of participation instead of talking about them as though they are binary opposites (le Roux, 2015; Sinwell, 2010). These concepts tend to be, in the mainstream literature, defined and discussed without giving reference to the private and public lives of women. This study takes as a starting point the existing debates about participatory governance and development and uses these to look at the lives of women within these spaces to show how they interface in Freedom Park.
Historically, black women have been an integral part of protests in South Africa. Since South Africa’s democratic elections in 1994, black women have continued to be at the forefront and background of social movements, social movement organisations and social protests. However, there has been relatively little interest in who the women are, where they live and what they do before and after protests. The experience of women’s resistance has been examined primarily in the limited context of women’s political organisations (e.g., ANC Women’s League). Other scholars such as Benson (2015), Miraftab (2006) and Pointer (2004) have looked closely at the lives of women in the new social movements to examine their role and treatment. They don’t, however, examine their roles in an in-depth manner both at home and in the organisation, thereby explaining how both the private and public lives of women intersect with each other. This dissertation examines how selected women who participate in popular protests in South Africa – for instance, the so-called service delivery protests –...