A critical investigation of post-apartheid life under a transformed legal, political and social order from the perspective of women. Taking the concrete lives of women in the new dispensation as point of departure, the tension between the ‘public’ face of the new legal order (human rights, constitutionalism) and the ‘private’ reality of individual lives is examined. The aim is to find alternative forms of subjectivity and agency other than those produced by a liberalist private economy or that of autonomous complacent individuals – lives that could resist new and old forms of hegemony.