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Feminist Studies

“Circles and circles”: Notes on African feminist debates around gender and violence in the c21

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This article seeks to explore, at a theoretical level, the broad trajectories of recent African feminist engagements with ideas about gender and violence, and argues that while there is evidence of “silo-isation” between different approaches to understanding what it means for feminists to strategise against violence, contemporary counter-heteronormative activisms can both benefit from links to differently-focused activism (such as work which confronts militarism) and simultaneously contribute enormously to how we can imagine worlds free of complex misogyny (Pereira, 2003). The article opens with a section which locates questions about the link between gender and violence within contemporary African feminism within exploration of colonialism and its legacies. The section moves into a brief survey of theory on what has been conventionally termed “gender-based violence” and highlights some of the debates in this field about the meaning of patriarchy, about the impact of wide-spread feminist activism shaped through NGOs and legal reform work, and about “culture” or “poverty” as explanations for violent misogyny. The following section suggests that these debates are articulated largely in isolation from other zones of writing, such as discussion of the HIV epidemic, work on African masculinities, and particularly recent research and writing about gender and militarism in African contexts, where masculinities are implicated in questions of war-driven violence. The final section asks what knowledges of violence against LGBTI identities, organisations, and spaces bring to the theorisation of gender and violence.

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: Feminist Africa.,
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Language
English
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Subject(s)
Sexual Violence
Violence against women
Feminist Africa
Queer
Heteronormativity
LGBTI
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Article
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