Navigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana
Navigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana

Author: Stephanie S. Starling

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-09-07

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1350356700

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Exploring the social construction of womanhood in Tswana culture, this book questions how gendered expectations are shifting in the context of a rapidly changing environment. Seismic social change is underfoot in Botswana, and gender relations are in flux. The government's enactment of extensive legal reforms, national programmes, and international instruments has gone a long way towards ensuring gender equality on an official basis. However, conventionally defined gender roles continue to present major obstacles for women. This book explores what it means to be a woman today in Botswana. The concept of womanhood as a mark of status and responsibility is interrogated, and the social consequences of failing to meet the criteria for womanhood are explored. Stephanie S. Starling considers the multiple and often contradictory burdens women face, the strategies they employ, and the sacrifices they make to meet their obligations. Caught between traditional expectations and modern desires, women share stories of agency, creativity and struggle in defining their own paths. A reflexive account of the fieldwork is presented. confronting the ethical challenges of cross-cultural research from a feminist standpoint.

Women and Land in Africa
Women and Land in Africa

Author: L Muthoni Wanyeki

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 2003-03

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13:

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Bringing together ongoing research into rural African women and land rights, this book has case studies from Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Women's Activism in Africa
Women's Activism in Africa

Author: Balghis Badri

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2017-02-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1783609117

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Throughout Africa, growing numbers of women are coming together and making their voices heard, mobilising around causes ranging from democracy and land rights to campaigns against domestic violence. In Tanzania and Tunisia, women have made major gains in their struggle for equal political rights, and in Sierra Leone and Liberia women have been at the forefront of efforts to promote peace and reconciliation. While some of these movements have been influenced by international feminism and external donors, increasingly it is African women who are shaping the global struggle for women’s rights. Bringing together African authors who themselves are part of the activist groups, this collection represents the only comprehensive and up-to-date overview of women’s movements in contemporary Africa. Drawing on case studies and fresh empirical material from across the continent, the authors challenge the prevailing assumption that notions of women’s rights have trickled down from the global north to the south, showing instead that these movements have been shaped by above all the unique experiences and concerns of the local women involved.

Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa
Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa

Author: Nwando Achebe

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0821440802

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An unapologetically African-centered monograph that reveals physical and spiritual forms and systems of female power and leadership in African cultures. Nwando Achebe’s unparalleled study documents elite females, female principles, and female spiritual entities across the African continent, from the ancient past to the present. Achebe breaks from Western perspectives, research methods, and their consequently incomplete, skewed accounts, to demonstrate the critical importance of distinctly African source materials and world views to any comprehensible African history. This means accounting for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible realm of spiritual gods and forces. That interconnected universe allows biological men and women to become female-gendered males and male-gendered females. This phenomenon empowers the existence of particular African beings, such as female husbands, male priestesses, female kings, and female pharaohs. Achebe portrays their combined power, influence, and authority in a sweeping, African-centric narrative that leads to an analogous consideration of contemporary African women as heads of state, government officials, religious leaders, and prominent entrepreneurs.

Engendering China
Engendering China

Author: Christina K. Gilmartin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1994-04-08

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9780674253322

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This first significant collection of essays on women in China in more than two decades captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural—and interdisciplinary—dialogue. For the first time, the voices of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United States. The distinguished contributors to this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in different countries, and were trained in different disciplines, but all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and making power-laden relationships visible. The essays take up gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Chapters focus on learned women in the eighteenth century, the changing status of contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction, prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering of work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction. Some of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime diaspora. Engendering China will appeal to a broad academic spectrum, including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory, feminist studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.

Lobola (Bridewealth) in Contemporary Southern Africa
Lobola (Bridewealth) in Contemporary Southern Africa

Author: Lovemore Togarasei

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-03

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 3030595234

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This volume explores the multiple meanings and implications of lobola in Southern Africa. The payment of lobola (often controversially translated as ‘bridewealth’) is an entrenched practice in most societies in Southern Africa. Although having a long tradition, of late there have been voices questioning its relevance in contemporary times while others vehemently defend the practice. This book brings together a range of scholars from different academic disciplines, national contexts, institutions, genders, and ethnic backgrounds to debate the relevance of lobola in contemporary southern African communities for gender equality.

Male Daughters, Female Husbands
Male Daughters, Female Husbands

Author: Professor Ifi Amadiume

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2015-03-12

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1783603348

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In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.

Woman and the Demon
Woman and the Demon

Author: Nina Auerbach

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780674954076

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Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature.

The Poetics of Difference
The Poetics of Difference

Author: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0252052897

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Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship. Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.