Femme Fatales: Girl Gangsters and Violent Street Culture in Cape Town

This article examines the ways that 21 girl gangsters perform violent street culture in Cape Town, South Africa. It examines their participation in the city’s township gangs, with a particular focus on female involvement in gang-related acts of aggression and violence. Research looks to move beyond portrayals of girl gangsters in Cape Town as either victims or accessories. It shows how they leverage street cultural performances in reaction to intersectional oppression, and in an attempt to empower themselves. Young women in this study joined gangs and took part in violence for many of the same reasons that men do—protection, income, status, and so on—as well as due to threats of sexual violence faced specifically by females. But street cultural participation for females in Cape Town also often perpetuates cycles of violent victimization, incarceration, and substance abuse that keep girl gangsters trapped in a life on the streets. In this way, females in this study broke from the binary view of girl gangsterism as either totally liberating or totally injurious, embodying both simultaneously.