The Politics of Trauma: Gender, Futurity, and Violence Prevention in South Africa

Abstract

In this article, I consider the framing of trauma as an epigenetic exposure that warrants intergenerational interventions. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa in 2014–15 to illustrate how violence prevention in this context is increasingly framed in epigenetic terms. I show that, in contrast to the anticipatory logic of a programmatic focus on maternal investment as a means to arrest intergenerational cycles of violence, violence produces different infrastructures of anticipation and effects on intergenerational relations. I argue against the speculative conflation of trauma and intergenerational epigenetics, to resist a newly biologized view of the bodily manifestations of apartheid history—in itself a re-inscription of damage, and a form of violence. Drawing on Murphy's concept of distributed reproduction (2017b), I argue for collectivized forms of intervention that aim for accountability and social justice.