Narrative Landscapes Of Female Sexuality In Africa

This book explores the textures of women’s narratives of patriarchal oppression of female sexuality. Postcolonial feminist scholars in Africa highlight the importance of moving beyond Westernised lenses of ‘African’ women’s powerlessness, towards a focus on women’s culturally-specific sexual agency. However, few studies explore women’s psychological experiences of sexual oppression/agency in real depth. Narrative Landscapes of Female Sexuality in Africa traces the narratives of heterosexual migrant women from Zimbabwe, Kenya and Congo. The book offers insight into women’s experiences ‘back home,’ travelling through border posts in Africa, and life in current post-apartheid South Africa. Through a unique collectively-based methodology and a feminist poststructuralist lens, the author examines narrative strategies used by the women to manage and psychologically resist harmful discourses surrounding female sexuality and women’s bodies. The book offers rich exploration of the intersections of gender and sexuality, class, race and citizenship situating the narratives within the wider context of poverty and migration in sub-Saharan Africa. These vectors of oppression are illuminated throughout the text via integrated threads of the researcher’s positionality in relation to the women narrators.

This book argues that the principles of Pan-Africanism are more important than ever in ensuring the liberation of the people Africa, those at home and abroad, and the rapid development of the African continent. The writings and practice of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence prime minister and president, were key in laying out a vision for post-independence Africa. Now, in an effort to counter the deluge of neo-liberal thinking that has engulfed so much of the debate on African development in recent decades, Michael Williams illuminates just how important a role an Nkrumaist intellectual framework can play in providing an accurate diagnosis of, and effective solution to, Africa’s development crisis. This is done by examining Nkrumah’s vision of the critical role Pan-Africanism must play in the development of the continent. Raising vitally important questions about Africa’s development and the quality of life of its populations, this book will be a key text for researchers of African politics, development studies, and the Pan-African movement.

​This book offers a platform for the analysis of commemorative and archiving practices as they were shaped, expanded, and developed during the Covid-19 lockdown periods in 2020 and the years that followed. By offering an extensive global view of these changes as well as of the continuities that went with them, the book enters a dialogue with what has emerged as an initial response to the pandemic and the ways in which it has affected memory and commemoration. The book aims to critically and empirically engage with this abundance of memory to understand both memorialization of the pandemic and commemoration during the pandemic: what happened then to commemorative practices and rituals around the world? How has the Covid-19 pandemic been archived and remembered? What will remembering it actually entail, and what will it mean in the future? Where did the Covid memory boom come from? Who was behind it, how did it emerge, and in what social configurations did it evolve?

This edited volume brings transnational feminisms in conversation with intersectional and decolonial approaches. The conversation is pluriversal; it voices and reflects upon a plurality of geo- and corpopolitical as well as epistemic locations in specific Global South/East/North/West contexts. The aim is to explore analytical modes that encourage transgressing methodological nationalisms which sustain unequal global power relations, and which are still ingrained in the disciplinary perspectives that define much social science and humanities research. A main focus of the volume is methodological. It asks how an engagement with transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms can stimulate border-crossings. Boundaries in academic knowledge-building, shaped by the limitations imposed by methodological nationalisms, are challenged in the book. The same applies to boundaries of conventional – disembodied and ethically un-affected – academic writing modes. The transgressive methodological aims are also pursued through mixing genres and shifting boundaries between academic and creative writing. Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, students (from undergraduate to postgraduate levels), activists and NGOs, interested in questions about decoloniality, intersectionality, and transnational feminisms, as well as in methodologies for boundary transgressing knowledge-building.

Gender equity is woefully overdue—we cannot wait any longer. Yet gender equity will wait, just as it has for thousands of years, until women and men and people of all genders co-create it together. One-sided solutions are not enough, and shame and blame will get us nowhere. The new pathway to healing and creating right relations between the genders can only be forged by courageously confronting gender injustice from all sides, and moving through the ensuing ‘collective alchemy’ to transform gender injustice from the inside out. Inspired by the principles of Truth and Reconciliation developed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, the Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI) process has been implemented over three decades for thousands of people on six continents. Guided by the twin powers of truth and love, and supported by skillful facilitation, the GERI process—as demonstrated in this book—creates safe forums to empower the unraveling of gender and sexual conditioning with alchemical depth and acumen, and initiate a whole new culture of gender relations and beloved community. With contributions from dozens of GERI participants, twelve distinguished world leaders in related fields, and special inserts from such notable persons as Stanislav Grof, M.D., Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, and Peter Rutter, M.D., this book is an invaluable resource for laypersons and professionals, politicians and psychotherapists, educators and religious leaders, who are eager to discover new proven pathways to transform gender-based conflicts and address the needs of young and old in their homes, therapy practices, organizations, and congregations across the globe. Gender Equity is the one certain step to heal humanity. ... This book and the GERI program illuminates a path to do just that. —Justin Baldoni, author of Man Enough Inspiring and intersectional approach, ... underscores the transformative power of gender justice movements. —Latanya Mapp Frett, President and CEO of Global Fund for Women Magnificent heartfelt healing work, ... gifts us a map of deep positive transformation. —Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart A groundbreaking guide for all who want fulfilling relationships, and a more caring and equitable world. —Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade and Nurturing Our Humanity

Changing Narratives of Sexuality examines the tensions and contradictions in constructions of gender, sexuality and women's empowerment in the various narrations of sexuality told by and about women. From storytelling to women's engagement with state institutions, stories of unmarried women and ageing women, a sex scandal and narrations of religious influence on women's subjectivities and sexualities, this impressive collection explores sexuality in a wide range of national contexts in the global South. The authors analyse what scope exists for women to subvert repressive norms and conceptions of heterosexuality, interweaving rich, contextual detail with theoretical concerns.

This study focuses on the language around sexuality and discourses about sex, labeled by the authors as metasex, from a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike many existing studies on sexting that predominantly take into account the linguistic practices of teenagers often located in the Global North, this book offers a more holistic approach by discussing Southern concepts of body parts, their conceptualization and mediatization (“dick pics”), the interconnectedness of food and sex and its sensualization (“foodporn”) as well as processes of social cohesion around sex, sociability and conviviality (“bonding”). Based on an anthropological linguistic perspective, the authors analyze metasex practices from Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, the Mediterranean, and numerous other contexts. Africanist Agnes Brühwiler’s afterword on sex (talk) in Tanzania rounds off the various fresh insights this study offers.

Gendered Pathologies examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. According to medical and scientific views of the period, the woman who did not conform to the dictates of gender ideology was, biologically speaking, aberrant: a deviation from the norm. Yet, although marginalized in a social sense, the "deviant" woman was central as a literary and cultural trope. Analyzing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Hardy alongside Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, Archimedes argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves, on a narrative level, larger cultural anxieties about the health of the British as a species. While earlier feminist investigations asserted that bourgeois ideology helped to construct scientific discourses about female sexuality and social behavior, this study takes these assertions as a starting point . Examining incest, racial stereotyping, and neurasthenia, Gendered Pathologies attempts to shed light on the ways in which biological thinking permeated British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.