South Africa

- an approach to embedding gender processes into specific historical, cultural, and economic/political contexts.

Amina Mama’s Notes on Gender stress the historical specificity of the operation of gender, and Oyewumi considers carefully how this operation was, and is, placed within the organization of different societies: where and when is “gendering” a central political and cultural force? How, for example, does “gendering” interact with the dominance of class construction, or the weight of colonial influences?

This course aims to introduce students to the various approaches and assumptions that are implicit in the phrase Gender and Development. The everyday use of the term Development assumes that societies are on a linear path of continuous material improvement in terms of technology, economics, population growth, health, and education. Secondly, the phrase Gender and Development is usually understood to mean that women need to be brought on board the development project. Critics of the linear approach to development argue that social change linked to colonialism and migration in the third world have contributed to these societies’ economic and social underdevelopment. Similarly feminists have argued that development for women is more complex than a simple process of adding women to general development.

This is not an exhaustive list of women’s organisations that have actively engaged in peace activism on the continent. This is a list of institutions that have been integral to either innovative or ‘well talked about’ peacebuilding efforts by some women’s groups and organsations on the continent.

Peace studies is a growing academic field that has its scholarly roots in international relations (IR), political science, and history. All three academic disciplines consider the nation state as a primary constitutive element of the international system and central to social stability, security, and peace. This has been heavily critiqued by IR feminists (Still, 1998; Stean 1998, among others) who associate the notion of the nation state with an embedded patriarchal system that entrenches hierarchical social relations across race, class, and gender.

It is challenging, in a way, to talk about legal feminism in Africa when the concept of “African feminism” itself is an issue of persistent contestation on the continent.   What I address myself to here are the various ways that feminists around the continent have analysed the law and the ways they have used it to pursue their struggles for gender equality and women’s human rights.   What gains have been made and what are the limitations?