Reframing Corporate Subjectivity: Systemic Inequality and the Company at the Intersection of Race, Gender and Poverty

In this paper I use South Africa as a reference point to discuss the company as a juristic person and
its relationship to natural persons through the concepts of subjectivity and personhood. I do this in
an attempt to reveal that granting of juristic personality as ‘the company’ is not a neutral, organic
or inevitable product of the law and economy but a construct symbiotically bound to the colonial
state. Underlying this juristic personhood is colonial ideology which perpetuates racialized and
gendered poverty and inequality as systemic oppression, in order to deliberately facilitate and
maintain conditions of domination and exploitation. Rather than taking the conventional business
and human rights starting point that accepts the corporate structure without critique, it is argued
that by reorienting away from juristic personality as purportedly ‘neutral’ and reframing the
construct, the powers of the company might be curtailed, thereby interrupting these continuing
colonial logics.