South Africa is currently labelled the rape capital of the world, with the world's highest levels of reported rapes. It also experiences alarming levels of intimate partner violence and femicide, as well as increasing reports of hate crimes against Black African lesbians. This paper focuses on a qualitative, biographical-interpretive PhD study, which explored how women’s lives and identities are transformed by living in this culture of violence. Free-association, narrative interviews were conducted with 27 women, who attended a South African university and interpretive analysis, drawing on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and narrative theory, was used to analyse the data. Findings revealed that women that resisted dominant discourses of femininity, which support hegemonic masculinity, were subject to violence and intimidation. Two women's stories were drawn on to illustrate this finding. These two women faced LGBT-related hate crimes, attacks and rape as a consequence of not subscribing to subordinate discourses of femininity. This paper explores the interaction between gender and identity in post-apartheid South Africa.
