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- Convenor:
-
Signe Arnfred
(Roskilde University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- NB005
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
With points of departure in empirical studies of relations between male and female in African contexts, the panel aims to critically investigate mainstream notions of gender equality
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades gender equality has become the primary goal of gender struggle on a global scale: equality in terms of equal access to income and property, to education and health, and equal political representation. This is what gender equality looked like in the eyes of early socialist governments in Africa (Mozambique and Angola, among others) and this is what gender equality looks like in the eyes of contemporary development organizations. But beyond such notions, what does gender equality actually mean? Is it women entering male domains? Or does it include also men entering female domains? If so, what about differences between male and female bodies, such as the capacity of female bodies for giving birth? How do ideas of gender equality cope with this type of difference? How do notions of male and female in African contexts fit into conventional conceptions of gender equality? Contemporary African feminists question the very concept of gender, including taken-for-granted power imbalances between men and women. They see such concepts as colonial constructs, along with the concept of race, preferring to talk about male and female as something situational and fluent. Such lines of thinking challenge mainstream notions of gender equality, pointing to a need for re-conceptualizations. With points of departure in empirical studies of relations between male and female in African contexts, the panel aims to critically investigate notions of gender equality.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Barbara Crossouard (Centre for International Education) Mairead Dunne (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
In three West African contexts we explore the ways strong gender hierarchies were instantiated within Muslim youth’s national and religious imaginaries. In particular, we examine the agentive contestations of female Muslim youth against their gender subordination.
Paper long abstract:
We use recent empirical research with Muslim youth in three different West African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal) to explore how gender is performed and recruited in the constructions of religious and national identities. The Muslim youth claims to 'authentic' national and religious belonging pivoted on emphasised articulations of gender differences and hierarchies. To this extent their discourses of identity constantly invoked binary gender distinctions in which females were always subordinate to males. This gender symbolism was integral to both national and religious imaginaries.
Significantly, in this paper we illustrate how female Muslim youth were agentic in contesting their subordinate positioning. In doing so, they invoked both Islamic codes and juridical notions of gender equality enshrined in the national policies of the three countries. Whether drawing on religious or national codes however, the gender binary remained untroubled. For example, female youth drew on Islamic codes to point to men's obligations to them within Islam, but this left intact an assumed differentiation between male and female within Islamic practice. Furthermore, juridical codes, based in a liberal gender binary, were often readily dismissed as 'inauthentic' impositions of western/colonial origins and as in conflict with proper religious/Islamic practices, in ways that rendered female youth's contestations doubly problematic. Overall, our research shows the inadequacy of liberal understandings of gender equality for disrupting the powerful gender symbolism embedded in youth's national and religious imaginaries as well as the material conditions that emanate from these.
Patrícia Gomes (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)
Paper short abstract:
Based on field reserach conducted in the south region of Guinea-Bissau and on theoretical African perspectives, the paper seeks to discuss critically the achievements resulting from women’s participation in the liberation struggle
Paper long abstract:
The Portuguese speaking African countries- which are as PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa)- and became independent in the mid 1970s, have experienced different historical and political pathways and have internal sociocultural complexities on their own.
Guinea-Bissau could count on women's contribution to the national liberation process. In spite of this, the post-independent period was arguably not followed by a political Agenda drawing from gender equity. Considering local differences, most women were confronted with the "betryal" of the promises made as far as the promotion of their socio-economic and political status in the following years was concerned. Based on field reserach conducted in the south region of Guinea-Bissau between 2014 and 2015 (interviews with ex-combatants and political leaders) and on theoretical African perspectives (AMADIUME, 1987; OYÈWUMÍ, 2005, 2010, 2015; ZELEZA, 2005; KOLAWOLE, 2002, 2004) on "gender" as central analytical concept that need to be reformulated/revisited/deconstructed since the category is also an epistemoogical problem and which logic of the social world cannot be seen as universally applicable, the paper seeks to discuss critically the following questions:
1- What are the achievements resulting from women's participation in the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau?
2- To what extent can (un)successful emancipation in Guinea-Bissau be explained by an understanding of gender as a concept (celebrated and defended by the nationalist narratives) which was/is (un)able to retrieve the local realities
Yamara-Monika Wessling (University of Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
In the context of extensive gender and class policies in Rwanda, middle-class women are central actors in negotiating gender equality including both feminist and conservative notions. They create the image of the new Rwandan woman which challenges mainstream ideas of gender equality and feminity.
Paper long abstract:
With its 64 % of female representatives in the parliament, Rwanda's government has positioned itself as a worldwide leading actor in gender politics. Gender equality is considered a cross cutting issue in the ambitious development plan Vision 2020. Intertwined with the emergence of a middle class, these gender policies transform notions of feminity and role models for women and girls. This paper is about these "New Rwandan women". Highly educated, urban middle-class women are not only the primal beneficiaries of the gender and class policies, they are also central actors in defining new roles for themselves and in reshaping notions of feminity. In doing so, they navigate through ideas of gender equality and modernity as well as restrictive societal expectations, which persist despite all efforts to change "the traditional mindset". Based on data from biographic interviews I argue that middle-class women may sometimes be submitted to these conservative ideas from outside, but that they often choose freely to comply with them, for instance respecting the husband as chef de famille, taking care of the household and the children, or displaying virginity. Middle-class women claim they live the right combination of feminism and morality. This way, they distinguish themselves from uneducated, rural women, who - in their eyes - did not understand the concept of gender equality properly. What, then, does gender equality mean for Rwandan middle-class women? How do they define feminism? In this paper, I will shed light on these questions and thereby trace the notions of feminity in Rwanda.
Odoja Asogwa (University of Nigeria, Nsukka)
Paper short abstract:
This study, anchored in Igbo society, an archetype of a patriarchal society, and their masking traditions, is situated within the debate around the struggle for gender equality. It raises people's consciousness to the taken-for-granted issues in masquerade activities that perpetrate patriarchy.
Paper long abstract:
Masquerading is an integral part of African culture that centres on land and the ancestors. In African societies, it seems as if men monopolise masquerading activities and women are not allowed to get directly involved or participate. This study is anchored in Igbo society and their masking traditions; Igbo society is an archetype of a patriarchal society. The argument of the paper is situated within the debate around the struggle for gender equality which is the main project of feminism. It tries to raise people's consciousness to the taken-for-granted issues in masquerade activities that help to reproduce and perpetrate the patriarchy. I have, as an initiate of a masquerade cult, participated in masquerade activities in parts of Igbo land for more than twenty-five years as a participant observer. I will, therefore, draw on my field notes, interviews, and photographic images, taken during field works. Apart from being active audience of masquerade activities and playing other key roles, women are inducted into masquerade cults and women inductees could commission and possess masquerades in some parts of Igbo land. Women do not take part in certain aspects of masking mainly because biology may not at times allow them. Therefore, the seemingly exclusion of women from masquerading activities is not a social construct to marginalise or debase the women but a recognition of their child-bearing role and its attendant constraints.
Sherianne Kramer (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This study reconstitutes the roles of identity categories such as gender, sexuality, age, and race in outlining the parameters of ‘truth’ for transgression, victimhood and violence. This is achieved by critically analysing discourses utilised by female and child perpetrators and male victims.
Paper long abstract:
Violence is constructed by discourses that constrain men to perpetrators and women and children to victims. Categories of race and class further limit these constructions in South Africa due to multiple and diverse identities and the current explosion of public and scientific possibilities for violence driven by social inequalities and high rates of crime and sexual violence. This research aims to interrogate the cultural conditions that make possible forms of violence that disrupt our understandings of 'truth' and reality. The study thus turns to female and child perpetrators of physical and sexual violence and to male victims as targets for data collection. These configurations of the child-transgressor, woman-transgressor, and male victim offer an opportunity to decipher the material conditions that make such formulations possible and the elements of the cultural milieu that contribute to the surfacing of these 'new' transgressions in the psychological, legal and criminal disciplines and, thus, the public consciousness. The critical framework lends itself to critical discourse analyses based on participants' case files, court proceedings and interviews. This process will surface those discursive coordinates that make them 'real' and fathomable perpetrators and/or victims in the current South African landscape. By calling into question the universality of 'truths' about gender, sexuality, age and race and identifying the cultural conditions of possibility for victimhood and perpetration, this research intends to demonstrate how social, contextual and political categories define, limit and demarcate possibilities for identity in violent encounters.