Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth.

Intra-Gender Complicity and the Objectification of Woman in Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade

This paper considers the inhuman treatment women mete to fellow women using the character representation in A Sister to Scheherazade. It attempts to establish that women contribute greatly to their own oppression in the society by critically analyzing the actions of women characters in the narration. S. L. Barky's explication on the idea of objectification is employed to explain the relationship between female characters in the primary text and to establish the spur of oppression in the text, and by implication, identify the oppressors; whereas Patricia H. Collins's concept of binary thinking is used to describe the intentions of the identified oppressors. The analysis of the primary text reveals various needs of the major characters and how they attempt to achieve such needs of theirs by giving up the protagonist. It reveals further that the deeds of the major female characters in the primary text are the reasons the protagonist suffers. The paper, therefore, concludes that as in the case of the protagonist in the text, the objectified is not only used as a means to an end but is a victim of collective and intra-gender oppression.

Sex Roles and the Erasure of Women from Conversations About Gender Oppression: The Case of #BoysDanceToo

In 2019, the #BoysDanceToo movement reacted in anger to controversial, misogynistic remarks made on Good Morning America. These reactions highlighted the challenges faced by men and boys in dance. Yet, previous studies have documented significant advantages for men in dance. In an analysis of the discourse used in online posts related to the #BoysDanceToo movement, I find that these broader structural gender inequalities are generally not examined. Responses also do not interrogate the antifemininity that fuels the stigma against boys and men who dance. Analysis suggests that this is due to an overreliance on the language of sex roles—which can mask the oppression of women (as a group) by men (as a group)—and the neglect of a relational understanding of gender. As a result, women are largely erased from a conversation about gender oppression.

Speechless

This paper sets out fromthe understanding that empowerment is a process by which those who have been denied power gain power, in particular the ability to make strategic life choices. For women, these could be the capacity to choose a marriage partner, a livelihood, or whether or not to have children. For this power to come about, three interrelated dimensions are needed: access to and control of resources; agency (the ability to use these resources to bring about new opportunities) and achievements (the attainment of new social outcomes). Empowerment, therefore, is both a process and an end result. This understanding differs greatly from instrumentalist interpretations which view empowerment purely in terms of measurable outcomes. Instrumentalist interpretations are problematic because they convey the belief that social change can be predicted and prescribed in a cause-and-effect way and undermine the notion that women’s empowerment should be about the ability of women to make self-determined choices. Third World countries are increasingly forced to rely on internal resource mobilization to make up for sharp reductions in external aid and resources. Alongside this, development processes are often indifferent to the interests and needs of the poor. In this scenario, women’s contributions as workers and as managers of human welfare-are central to the ability of households, communities, and nations to tackle the resulting crisis. However, women suffer from decreased access to resources and increased demands on their labor and time. If human survival is the world’s most pressing problem, and if women are crucial to that survival, then the empowerment of women is essential for the emergence of new, creative, and cooperative solutions. As part of the empowerment process, feminism and collective action are fundamental but feminism must not be monolithic in its issues, goals, and strategies, since it should constitute the political expression of the concerns and interests of women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds. There is and must be a diversity of feminisms, responsive to the different needs and concerns of different women and defined by women for themselves. The underlying foundation to this diversity is the common opposition to gender oppression and other forms of domination. In the ongoing United Nations debate on human rights and sexuality, sexual rights have been conceptualizedin largely negative ways in relation to issues of protection against pregnancy, rape, disease, and violence. This paper calls for an inclusion of more positive aspects of sexual rights.

Action at intersections

Military veterans are popularly imagined to be men, but recent decades have seen an increase in the number of women in the military, including women of color and queer-identified people. This diversification of the military is increasingly reflected in veterans’ peace organizations like Veterans For Peace and About Face. This younger, diverse generation of veterans brings their multiple experiences of race, social class, and gender oppression—before, during, and after their military service—to their anti-war activism. Their collective intersectional knowledge in turn shapes their activism, as veterans. The chapter reviews the literature on women and LGBTQ people in the military; intersectionality as an academic field; and intersectional praxis as an emergent connective tissue in the broader field of progressive activism. The chapter poses a question grounded in the tensions and possibilities of the present historical moment: How will veterans’ peace organizations respond to the challenges introduced by a younger and far more diverse cohort of activist veterans?

Patriarchy in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power: A Gynocentric Approach

African literature has been dominated by male African writers. However, there are a number of female African writers who contributed to the literary landscape of the continent significantly. In line with this, researches that deal with issues of gender in African literature are increasing (Fonchingong, 2006; Salami-Boukari, 2012; Stratton, 1994). In this study, I aim to expose patriarchal oppression in two selected post-colonial African novels. I ask “How do postcolonial African female writers expose gender oppression and patriarchy in their novels?” I ask how the female characters in the selected novels resist patriarchal dominance and oppression. I seek to uncover any thematic patterns and/or overlaps that would emerge across the selected novels. To achieve this, I analyze two feminist Anglophone African novels by female writers of the continent, namely ‘The Slave Girl’ and ‘A Question of Power’. Gynocentrism is used as an approach to achieve this purpose. The analyses of the novels make it feel that patriarchy is used as a tool to stabilize the discrimination of the feminine gender. The heroines in both novels are found to be patriarchal women with some attempt to reverse the gender order. The major female characters in the novels stand against the intersectional discrimination of the feminine from the male personhood, religion, as well as colonial culture. These discussions about patriarchy revive the vitality of African feminist novels to the present readers.

Gender and Education in Uganda

Gendered oppression is complex and situated in social constructs which are manifested and learned in education institutions and learning programs the world over. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are an international attempt to create a more equitable world, and they include both education and gender as independent and interdependent goals. Uganda is a country that is attempting to address the significant gender oppression that plagues it. To cure gender oppression realistically and fully, a deep and transformative approach that addresses systemic power imbalances is essential. A disruption of this magnitude requires critical and empowering education that simultaneously ruptures the violence of patriarchy and creates conditions of capability for everyone to heal and move forward together.

Rewriting Immigrant Masculinities in Selected Works of Bharati Mukherjee

The precedence of women over men in Bharati Mukherjee’s works reflects an attempt on her part to construct a feminine narrative as a means of countering the marginalized position that women usually occupy in mainstream traditional literature. This paper probes how with such displacement of female perspectives into an authoritative position, routinely prescribed for men, Mukherjee revises the suspiciously stable place occupied by male immigrant subjects in fictional writings. Employing the critical voices of several masculinity theorists, this paper explores how immigrant men’s conceptions of masculinity are reformulated and challenged by their migration processes. Seen in the light of gender oppression, the male characters, seem to occupy an ineffective and feminine narrative space even in powerful male stories of immigrant economic success written by Mukherjee. Finally, the paper probes how Mukherjee’s act of rewriting masculinity from inventive perspectives in her fictions introduces new, more egalitarian, and alternate models of manhood.

“The body says: I am a party”: The (im)possibility of regulating the body by law

The rationalism of the seventeenth century inaugurated a new way of thinking to establish that access to the world occurred through rationality. The individualist conception of society that emerged from the eighteenth century, despite having placed the subject in the center, made it from its psychic dimension, relegating the biological body to the second place. In the twentieth century however, Freud recalls the theme of the body to enter again the individual in his materialistic body. Therefore, it was restored and deepened the theme of meat, carcass, organic and biological body. Thus, the present study aims, from the hypothetical-deductive method, to analyze the (im)possibility of body regulation, especially the female one, by the contemporary law, and its practical implications for women to, in the end, conclude that the body and their narratives are at the root of inequality and gender oppression. El racionalismo del siglo XVII inauguró un nuevo pensamiento que establecía que el acceso al mundo ocurría a través de la racionalidad. La concepción individualista de la sociedad que emergió del siglo XVIII, pese a haber colocado al sujeto en el centro, lo había hecho desde su dimensión psíquica, relegando el cuerpo biológico a un segundo plano. En el siglo XX, en cambio, Freud recupera el tema del cuerpo y resitúa al individuo en su cuerpo material. Por tanto, los temas de la carne, carcasa, y cuerpo orgánico y biológico se restauran y se profundiza en ellos. Así pues, este artículo pretende analizar, a través del método hipotético-deductivo, la (im)posibilidad de regular el cuerpo, especialmente el femenino, por el derecho contemporáneo, y las implicaciones prácticas para las mujeres. Finalmente, concluimos que el cuerpo y sus narrativas están en la raíz de la desigualdad y de la opresión de género.