This
article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town,
South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization
movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert
their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service
disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of
invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of
grassroots actions spanning those. The article also sheds light on
the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how its patriarchal order is
being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering
feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and
informal arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in
constructing yet another binary relation between grassroots coping
strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies (in invented
spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists’ extended
notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the
poor in order to construct an inclusive citizenship. It argues that
doing so better reflects the practices of the grassroots and
furthers a progressive feminist praxis.
