Paper short abstract:

Explores livelihoods and gender relations for female heads of households in urban South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper strikes up a conversation with Mark Hunter's wonderful 2010 book, Love in the Time of Aids. Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa. Hunter raises some considerable challenges to understandings of gender relations in contemporary South Africa. Focusing specifically on his concepts of the "political economy and geography of intimacy" and "love" and his challenge of the concept of a "crisis of masculinity", this paper suggests that feminist and critical masculinity approaches remain valid tools to analyse the lives of urban women, especially female heads of households. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews with female heads of households in three townships of Pietermaritzburg (Msunduzi), KwaZulu-Natal in 2010, this paper outlines the harsh realities of women left to raise children and grandchildren on their own, their disappointments in "love" and men, and their economic marginality and dependence on the state. As a demographic trend, female headed households in poor, often informal, urban areas, have been noted in South Africa since at least the 1930s. Today, they are the norm in poorer urban townships. While these dynamics could be read as a "crisis" of marriage and gender relations, there are also deep experiences of positive emotional and psychological transformation at play that resonate with a feminist understanding of female challenges to patriarchal power, violence and abuse.