‘[I]f I am Alone I feel like a Target Sometimes’: The Making and Unmaking of the Vulnerable White Woman in Strange Encounters with the Black Man in the South African (Post)Colony

In research about South Africa and its troubled past it has now been well established that the devastating systems of racial categorisation oppression colonialism apartheid were deeply thoroughly gendered. Colonial/apartheid logic constructs white femininity as highly vulnerable, passive private, specifically in relation to imputed hypersexuality Black man – a contrast historically justifies consolidates hetero-patriarchal control over woman (as ‘protection’) surveillance people (and men) origin danger. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory on strange encounters, this article provides close reading story Helena Marais, young from African town narrated by herself researchers Centre Afterlife Violence Reparative Quest) with particular interest how colonial/apartheid gender continues condition terms which she inhabits her body world, turn, renders both instrumental complicit reinscription spatialisation decades after formal ending apartheid. conclusion, will ask what is at stake if should attempt encounter differently.