The partial street: gendering the everyday life of global precarity

The street is a space seldom fully available to women. As an ambivalent public terrain, it sustains audacious social experiments and transgressions, while hosting gendered performativities and misogynist misdoings. Partiality itself conjures ideas of prejudices, preferences and limits, and it is this unsettled notion of a space that is simultaneously available and unavailable, convivial and violent, prevalent and ephemeral, that we engage with. We draw on an array of feminist insights on gendered inhabitations of the partial street across varied geographies, asking what these tell us about gender, place and power to complicate ideas of precarity, publicness and the quotidian. We then delve into a particular set of street interiors shaped by migrant women in Cape Town, South Africa. Interiority offers an up-close realm from which to observe normative disciplining that is simultaneously sovereign, material, racial, gendered and sexual, alongside the creative possibilities of refusing these hierarchies and categories.