Gender, Health and Embodiment

Chapter 3 is the first of this book’s five substantive chapters. This chapter zooms into the intimate worlds of women living in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Based on fine-grained ethnographic research, it brings to light the nuanced struggles that women encounter in their sexual, social and economic worlds. These struggles are articulated, too, in relation to the history of South Africa’s failure to provide essential medicines and the subsequent increase in vertical transmission of HIV from parents to their children through birth and breastfeeding. This has had lasting implications for the women in this study, and for their children, and these implications are detailed in the first section of this chapter. The second section, on ‘horizontal pathways’, looks at the evolution of sexual and reproductive rights and women’s experiences of gender-based violence in South Africa. The final section of the chapter explores women’s strategic negotiation of these forms of harm and underlines the value of thinking more critically around the ways in which women act strategically to navigate their lives in highly complex and often violent contexts.