Abstract:
This issue of Feminist Africa is a special edition which foregrounds the
research created, with the young women, through the five different teams.
Jill Bradbury and Peace Kiguwa, working with a team of young women,
write about their own visual mapping of the University of the Witwatersrand
as a way of re-seeing campus streets and surroundings in terms of sexual
pleasure and sexual vulnerability. Sethunya Mosime, Poloko Ntshwarang,
and Godisang Mookodi from the University of Botswana focused on the
use of personal story-telling to generate dialogue about sexual conventions
and the negotiation of gendered expectations for young women on campus,
and off. Pieces by Tanja Bosch and Susan Holland-Muter, of the University
of Cape Town, Lucy Edwards-Jauch from the University of Namibia, and by
Naomi Wekwete and Charity Manyureke of the University of Zimbabwe add
texture and diversity to the articles’ analysis of the work with young women
on questions of gender-based violence and policy, the politics of space and
sexuality, the meaning of HIV-prevention campaigns, and the politics of
gender and sexual pleasure. In five teams, very interesting, cross-generational
action research projects were developed, and the material presented in
Feminist Africa 17 is rich with potential for theory on what it means to take
up SRHR work where young women’s lives are concerned.
