Dirty Politics: The Stories of Soap in South Africa

During the global Covid-19 pandemic, the practice of extensively washing one’s hands with soap and water became ubiquitous worldwide. In this contribution, I look at how cultural references to soap have been productive in producing social identities in South Africa. By utilizing Nira Yuval-Davis’s (2006) distinction between belonging and the politics of belonging, I trace how stories and narratives featuring soap that circulate in the South African cultural archive refer to specific cultural templates or social imaginaries. These stories and narratives perform different functions: they signify categories of social belonging, enable social subjects to identify with specific subject locations, and are utilized to both confirm and patrol the borders of these categories of belonging in acts that may be described as the “politics of belonging.”