Dr Azille Coetzee speaks with remarkable vulnerability and intellectual clarity about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within white Afrikaner identity. Drawing on personal memoir and theoretical inquiry, she examines how the apartheid regime not only demanded political loyalty but also shaped affective orientations, who white women were expected to love, obey, and fear. Through reflections on feminist genealogy, security logics in suburban life, and the haunting story of white women shipwrecked on the Pondoland coast who chose to remain, Coetzee pushes us to imagine lives no longer organised around whiteness. In conversation with Dr Anell Daries, she explores the emotional grip of inherited power and the possibility of desiring otherwise.
Azille Coetzee is a writer and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University. In her work she explores the relationship between gender and race in colonial logic, and the role of gender liberation in the project of decolonisation. Her research is published in various international feminist journals, like Hypatia, Feminist Review, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and she is the writer of the academic monograph Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity (2025, UKZN University Press).