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Research Articles (Gender Studies)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10413/7199

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Browsing Research Articles (Gender Studies) by Subject "Feminism--Africa."

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    Enacting masculinities: Pleasure to men and violence to women.
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge)/UNISA Press., 2013-05-02) Naidu, Uma Maheshvari.; Ngqila, Kholekile Hazel.
    Feminist anthropologists have shown how women’s bodies have been appropriated and rendered ‘docile’ by so called cultural or traditional practices, as well as by discourse. The compelled docility of African women (as that of other women in the global south), is perhaps especially visible within subtly coerced performances within a context of ‘traditional’ masculinised practices, such as unprotected sex, that leave many African women vulnerable and forced to negotiate a host of health concerns around sexually transmitted diseases and of course HIV/AIDS. This is to be seen as a form of violence perpetrated by men against their female partners. However, in probing condom use through a qualitative study with a small group of women, we notice that it is not simply a case of discerning patterns of hegemonic masculinities in relation to condom use or non-use, and that masculinities are also propped up and held together by the relational configurations of practice formed by (mutual) gender relations.
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    Wrestling with standpoint theory… some thoughts on standpoint and African feminism.
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge)/UNISA Press., 2010) Naidu, Uma Maheshvari.
    This essay attempts to probe the theory of standpoint feminism, and the charge of epistemic privilege associated with the theory. Standpoint theory itself can be seen to have emerged in the context of feminist critical theory attempting to explain the relationship between the production of knowledge and practices of power (Harding, 2004: 1). The essay attempts to probe the efficacy of a standpoint epistemic within the framework of the various asymmetries embedded in the lived experiences of women in African contexts. The essay works through the notion of ‘entanglement’ (Nuttall, 2009) which refers to the meshed and particular historical connections of an individual or group. It explores, through ethnographic insights, whether standpoint epistemology is able to offer a theoretical understanding of Black African women who are likewise ‘entangled’ within a particular archive of local socio-cultural and economic specificities.