REWORKING CITIZENSHIP, Race, Gender, and Kinship in South Africa

288pp., illus., paperback, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2025

ISBN: 9781503639171

Through long-term fieldwork with impoverished black African, Indian, and coloured (mixed race) women living in Durban, Brady G'sell demonstrates how historic resistance to racial and gendered marginalisation in South Africa informs current arguments that, despite having won the right to vote, without jobs to support their families the poor majority remain excluded. She argues that citizenship is dependent on the security of social (often kinship) relations, and presents the concept of relational citizenship as a way to re-imagine political belonging.

"Reworking Citizenship is a brilliant investigation into the relational basis of political belonging. Simultaneously a deep analysis of a particular place (a port neighborhood of Durban, South Africa) as well as a development of theories of citizenship and processes of kinship, G'Sell brings an anthropologist's eye to history and a historian's eye to anthropology." Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Carleton College

"What G'Sell accomplishes in this book is something that I haven't seen anywhere else. She combines a magisterial command of the thicket of past and present South African laws and policies related to child support with a careful ethnography of women who have been most dependent upon and most disappointed by those systems. This work is extremely important and an absolute pleasure to read." Lynn M. Thomas, University of Washington

Brady G'sell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.