Coconuts do not live in townships : cosmopolitanism and its failures in the urban peripheries of Cape Town

Abstract

The issue of temporality and gender – time as lived differently by diverse gendered bodies – has for the most part, not been a central concern of mainstream feminist theorists, particularly living and working in African contexts. Feminist geographers such as Gillian Rose (1993) and Doreen Massey (1994) have considered the meanings of time as lived by women through space as a means to interrogate the received notions of place as settled, timeless and occupied by people sharing a homogenous identity. Anthropologists in the South such as Antonadia Borges (2006) and cultural geographers, Oldfield and Boulton (2005) have considered a fine-grained analyses of time progression through the everyday activities in a particular place as a means to understand the complex negotiation of identity in space. Oldfield and Boulton, writing on young people’s negotiations to secure shelter in the context of Old Crossroads, Cape Town, South Africa, consider how these youth’s gendered and embodied experiences of the housing crisis, inform their expectations of partners, relationships and their interpretation of gendered citizenship in post-Apartheid South Africa.