Iin the middle of the story: Reflecting on feminist theory, epistemology, and practice in engaging gender non-conforming persons on the Cape Flats communities of South Africa

In the middle of the story: Reflecting on feminist theory, epistemology, and practice in engaging gender non-conforming persons on the Cape Flats communities of South Africa.

This presentation will reflect on the ways in which feminist theory and epistemology may both enable and disable reflexive research practice when engaging gender non-conforming subjects, specifically women, who reside on the Cape Flats of post-colonial South Africa.

Very little research has been conducted on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape of South Africa, and there are similarly minimal accounts of feminist engagement with the Cape Flats' communities of South Africa. Although most persons in the Western Cape, and concentrated on the Cape Flats in particular, are raced as 'coloured' (of mixed racial ancestory spanning over approximately the last three hundred and fifty years) and predominantly working-class, these communities and the persons who inhabit them, have generally not been the subject of research in current South Africa. As both insider and outsider to the Cape Flats, where racial, class, and gender dynamics operate in complex and often contradictory ways, I am interested in reflecting on the multiple ways in which my position as a feminist researcher in a specific space within the post-colony, raced as ‘coloured’, both allow and disallow an articulation of experience by gender non-conforming subjects, women in particular, who live on the Cape Flats. How is feminist theory and epistemology useful in this specific engagement? What does the space, between insider and outsider, allow for feminist practice? And how, in this 'in-between' space occupied by a feminist researcher, liaising with subjects as authors of their lived experience, is feminist theory made?