Patriarchal Supremacy in the Postcolonial City: Gendered Politics of Urban Space in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Abstract

This article examines Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City through the lens of postcolonial urban ecology, arguing that the novel identifies patriarchal supremacy as a structuring force in the production of urban marginality. Although Zoo City initially appears to envision an ethical reconfiguration of human–animal relations through enforced symbiosis, the narrative ultimately demonstrates how animalization operates as a mechanism of surveillance, discipline, and control within a male-dominated postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and urban environmental criticism, the article contends that the novel constructs Zoo City as both ecologically deteriorated and socially stratified, where women and nonhuman creatures are simultaneously marginalized, stigmatized, and subjected to systemic exploitation. The spatial containment of “animalled” bodies echoes colonial regimes of segregation that classified and regulated populations marked as deviant, thereby recasting the city as a terrain of environmental injustice and biopolitical governance. Through Zinzi December’s navigation of this precarious landscape, the text reveals how patriarchal authority converges with economic instability, ecological decay, and gendered violence to reproduce entrenched hierarchies of power. Rather than affirming hybridity or interspecies relationality as emancipatory, Zoo City interrogates the moral constraints of anthropocentric urban paradigms that privilege masculinist rationality while rendering feminized and nonhuman lives expendable. By embedding gendered domination within the material, spatial, and ecological conditions of the postcolonial city, this study advances critical conversations in environmental justice, urban ecological thought, and the politics shaping human–nonhuman entanglements.