Reducing Women to Bare Life: Sexual Violence in South Africa

Abstract

This article investigates rape through the lens of biopolitics, using Agamben’s notion of a state of exception and bare life. I will argue that there needs to be a closer look at the neglected sexual and gender dimensions of biopolitics in settler colonial societies, and specifically at the continuities of sexual violence of the settler colony with high levels sexual violence in present day South Africa. Women in post-colonial South Africa are included in a state of exception giving rise to bare life through the abandonment by the law and state agencies that have to implement the law. I end by considering the possibilities of resistance against bare life.