GWS - Feminist Knowledge

Increasingly, the emphasis in studies of women and health in Africa has been to politicise health issues, rather than to see them as straightforward "developmental" issues influenced by the trickle-down effect of resources and life-styles from the West. Scholars who have worked extensively on health issues (for example, Armstrong, 1986; 1990; 1998; Turshen, 1991; 1998; Green, 1999) have explicitly connected subjects like disease control, domestic violence and health services to what Turshen, in her introduction to the anthology Women and Health in Africa, describes as the "impact of large political and economic forces on [women's] lives…and the general problems of the communities in which women live, work, marry, divorce, and bear and raise children" (1991:1).

In line with this politicised focus has been a growing concern with especially vulnerable women, such as refugee women and girl children. Statistical evidence, case studies and lobbying revolving around the girl child have grown significantly over the last five years because of mounting attention paid to young girls by international instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Programme of Action initiated by the Beijing conference.

A further trend centres around researchers' emphasis on their own locations, on detailed case studies and on critiquing projections of African women as hapless victims of poverty, disease, aggressive male sexuality and violent initiation rites. Studies like Gunning's "Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminisms: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries" (1992) and Jo Fair's The Body Politic, the Bodies of Women, and the Politics of Famine in US Television Coverage of Famine in the Horn of Africa (1996) draw attention to ways in which women's health issues have been viewed through the distorting lenses of commentators. Complementing these critical interventions have been case studies demonstrating viable alternatives to eurocentric voyeurism. A decade ago, essays collected in Women and Health in Africa (1991), edited by Turshen, carefully explored the need for nuanced case studies in the appraisal of continental trends. More recent collections edited by Turshen and Twagiramariya, What Women Do In Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (1998) and Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen, The Aftermath - Women in Post-Conflict Transformation (2002), extend this tradition of thoughtful localised research, and highlight the massive political and military forces that affect women's health.

Many commentators remark on the social and academic silences surrounding sexuality in Africa and on the tendency to pathologise questions of sexuality in relation to women, rather than to explore issues from the perspective of women's general health and well-being. Few scholars have dealt with women's sexuality in relation to heterosexual or homoerotic desire and pleasure, with the writings on sexuality of a feminist like Pat McFadden in SAFERE and SAPEM offering a rare exception to the norm. McFadden argues that the dearth of discussion of women's sexual pleasure and desire indicates an ongoing "challenge of making the personal political", going on to state that the "personal is still interpreted as disloyalty to the community and as going against the preservation of African authenticity which is defined by altruism, by being willing to give all the time" (1998:25). The taboos, which influence research and academic work, surrounding women's sexuality and desire are of course not unique to African contexts. But it is interesting that traditions of feminist theory and writing in western contexts have often been crucially concerned with linking explorations of women's sexuality to broader challenges to patriarchal authority, knowledge and writing.

The absence of similar exploration in fields of African feminist and gender studies could be attributed to: tacit or direct rejections of colonial stereotyping of African (and especially African women's) "hyperdeveloped" sexuality (in refusing the stereotype, African women writers and researchers may have shied away from the exploration of sexuality altogether); the overwhelming and enduring impact of nineteenth-century colonial models of respectability and decorum in shaping assumptions about "modernity", respectability and the cult of domesticity in African contexts; and the emphasis within African studies, and especially gender and women's studies, on what are considered to be pressing collective issues of development and transformation, rather than on more humanistic and individual aspects of experience. An issue of the South African feminist journal, Agenda in 1996 sought to contest ingrained taboos by providing a forum for work that dealt with sexuality rather than with reproductive rights (the theme of a previous issue, no. 27) and was revealingly titled "Women's Sexuality: Let's talk About It…" At the start of a new millennium, this call continues to carry a special urgency if we consider the tremendous volume of work that reduces "sexuality" to reproduction and a fixation with such themes as disease, overpopulation and gender-based violence. The value of much of this work is explored in what follows; it is crucial to note, however, how it has drowned out other types of writing and research.

As noteworthy as the silences about sexuality in relation to holistic understandings of well-being and health is the deafening silence surrounding homophobia. Here it is significant that the escalating and often state-sanctioned homophobia evident in countries like Namibia and Zimbabwe, in view of its enormous impact of human freedoms and rights in the making of sexual choices, has received scant attention. The dearth of studies of homoerotic patterns, and the climate that contributes to censoring such patterns, are especially significant. Despite the paucity of local studies of homosexuality, some suggestive work has been undertaken by anthropologists on the distinctive forms of same-sex relations in Africa. Emphasis has been placed on unique ways in which sexual orientation is often codified in parts of Africa. As indicated by researchers, African trends frequently differ from the celebration of sexuality in western discussions.

A study highlighting attention to the cultural biases of western feminist and social constructionist theory is Gaudio's "Male Lesbians and Other Queer Notions in Hausa" (1998). In his investigation of the Hausa yan dauda, Gaudio shows how their dress, conduct and work all align them with a women's domain, while their sexual relations with other men is peripheralised so that "the practice of dauda is culturally understood in terms of gender rather than sexuality" (1998:119). Gaudio's appraisal of the relativity of the concepts we use to define homoerotic patterns also informs both Gay's and Kendall's studies of women's lesbian relationships. In "Mummies and Babies and Friends and Lovers in Lesotho" (1993), Gay describes customary same-sex relationships among young girls. Although involving sexual relations, these are not semantically conceptualised as such, with "sexual" being a term reserved for heterosexual relations. Exploring the same pattern in Lesotho, Kendall makes the observation that women in these contexts are often able to enjoy greater sexual freedom and avoid the crises faced by many lesbians in the west.

Aarma's "How Homosexuality Became 'Un-African': The Case of Zimbabwe" (1993), develops the discussion surrounding terminology in considering the notion of homosexuality as "un-African". Showing that African same-sex relationships have often been defined in terms that elude such categories as "gay", "lesbian" and "homosexual", she suggests that traditional African cultures were far more amenable to homoerotic patterns than is suggested by the virulent attacks, ostensibly defending African tradition, associated with figures like Robert Mugabe.

Studies of homoeroticism in Africa frequently draw attention to individuals' adoption of gendered behaviour that differs from "official" ones. Indicating that gender is performative, these explorations contribute to insights raised within "trans-gender theory," which has recently been expanding discussions of gender in the west. Greene's "The Institution of Woman-Marriage in Africa: A Cross-cultural Analysis" (1998) is particularly noteworthy because it draws connections between different patterns and suggests the theoretical relevance of these to understanding our acquisition or rejection of socially-imposed gender.

In contrast to the paucity of studies of sexual behaviour and desire are numerous works dealing with the centrality of gender and racial discourses to imperial sexuality. Studies of male colonial travel writers, novelists, artists and poets including Rider Haggard, David Livingstone, Thomas Pringle and Thomas Baines have been central here, with critics developing psychoanalytic discussions of the connections between fantasy, desire and representation. McClintock's impressive Imperial Leather (1994) considers links between imperial sexuality and colonial conquest and settlement. McClintock shows that eroticism and sexuality for colonial men were intimately connected to ways in which they "oriented themselves in space, as agents of power and agents of knowledge" (1994:24). Most notable about her study is not a linear narrative of triumphant colonial conquest, but the connections between control and fear, power and loss. By analysing the male coloniser's anxieties about "catastrophic boundary loss…associated with fears of impotence and infantalization and attended by an excess of boundary order and fantasies of unlimited power" (1994:26), she captures the precariousness of colonial desire.

Other studies, most notably by Sander Gilman (1985) explore imperial representations of African sexuality and bodies (in particular, inscriptions of Sarah Bartmann as part of their dissection of Victorian and colonial discourses. Importantly, research on representations of Bartmann has recently exploded to encompass thesis research, Internet discussion groups, taught courses and bibliographies. In fact, the scale of colonialist representations of Bartmann in the nineteenth century is currently reflected in oppositional readings that subject racial discourses to scrutiny.

Studies of imperial constructions of African (and especially African women's) sexualities are part of a wave of work on colonial narratives, fantasies and desire during the nineteenth century and before. This work is directly connected to the colonial discourse studies school of the eighties. Drawing on Foucauldian, Lacanian and Derridean models, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and V.Y Mudimbe have undertaken detailed psychoanalytic explorations of the links between desire and power in their work on orientalist and other colonial discourses. As part of a broader body of psychoanalytic study of the politics of representation, work on projections of African women's bodies departs from Marxist-inflected studies that located desire squarely in material and political interests. Much of the recent work explores the inconsistencies, intricacies and anomalies that determinist models cannot account for. Such work is also important in helping to explain processes of subjectification from the twentieth century. Desire for control and mastery, inscribed on both the land and on women's bodies, has directly linked colonial to nationalist and post-colonial narratives and myth-making in the years after decolonisation.

African women's sexuality is rarely analysed in ways approaching the comprehensive psychological probing of sexuality and femininity among western feminists. In this tradition, sexuality - from Simone De Beauviour to Elizabeth Grosz - has been key to work on gendered identities and hierarchies. The trend within African research has been materialist, with the emphasis falling on the overtly developmentalist and political aspects of sexuality. This trend is well illustrated in the African Journal of Fertility, Sexuality and Reproductive Health, which generally includes articles explicitly related to women's rights issues.

In most parts of Africa, women's rights to fertility control continue to be shrouded in moralistic and religious controversy, with abortion on demand remaining a hotly-debated issue (see Amanitare's website at http://www.amanitare.org). Debates about abortion in many countries have been heavily charged by religion, with interpretations of both Christian and Islamic doctrine being invoked to defend state policy. The prominence of religious argument has been most marked in Islamism, with discussions of state policy and women's fertility in countries like Algeria and Egypt directly dealing with the implications of religious doctrine on the law and state policy. In her discussion of policy-making in Algeria, Lazreg shows how the availability of contraception and information was connected to the government's concern with demographic control and development, rather than with women's rights. In Algeria, the gradual evolution of family planning policies was overseen by the Islamic Superior Council, with information on child-spacing at the start of the programme indicating the parameters in which women were to be "allowed" to use contraceptive services (Lazreg, 1994:161-2).

Karam (1998) has pointed out that contraception in Egypt is now readily available, although abortion continues to be enmeshed in moral, religious and anti-imperialist fervour. Describing debates in the nineties when Egyptian feminists supported women's entitlement to abortion in cases of rape and incest, she writes: "The furore … fed into already existing antagonisms and suspicions about a Western conspiracy to rid the Muslim world of its Islamic values by legalizing abortion, calling for women's equality and destroying family values" (1998:172). Karam shows how feminist demands can be marginalised by states that enlist charged political and religious rhetoric. That her discussion goes on to indicate that many women, initially supporting arguments for legalising abortions, retracted their calls in the face of the Egyptian government's response is a telling indication of how African women have been pressured into compromising their needs when confronting the multiple agendas encoded in popular national sentiment.

Fertility control in many parts of Africa, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, has been considerably influenced by the legacy of colonial policy. With the comparatively large-scale colonial settlement in countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, Angola and Mozambique, settler-colonial authorities adopted campaigns to contain the black population growth. These ranged from prescribing contraception for women without supervision, information or follow-up in Zimbabwe, to the use of harmful injectibles and forced sterilisation in Namibia and South Africa. As a strategy that outraged both men and women, fertility control has been tainted with images of enforced demographic control. It has consequently been inserted into post-colonial policy-making debates in extremely complicated ways.

It is worth noting, though, that many post-colonial governments, concerned primarily with enforcing women's mothering roles, rather than with facilitating women's control over their lives, have invoked only the sinister legacy of population control in Africa. Opportunities for women's empowerment in relation to information and progressive facilities have therefore been few. Zimbabwe is an example of a country where debates around abortion are heavily overlaid with patriarchal injunctions and the valorising of motherhood. Abortion is illegal in Zimbabwe, and while fertility control is generally available to all women, popular feeling places enormous constraints on women's efforts to make independent decisions and choices about their fertility. Capturing this, Jacobs and Howard write: "Caught between the differing demands of preserving their own social positions, of husbands and of state programmes, women have to struggle against men as individuals and against gender-based state policies to make decisions concerning their own fertility" (1987:37).

The complex position of women's reproductive rights within regionally distinct religious, moral and political discourses has made discussions of reproductive rights in the context of very particular circumstances important. Many studies champion the need to place reproductive rights firmly within the ambit of the state's responsibility for human rights. Alihonou et al.'s "Morbidity and Mortality Related to Induced Abortions" (1996), Okonofua's "Preventing Unsafe Abortion in Nigeria" (1997) and Nunes' "Unsafe Abortion: From Awful Silence to Positive Action" (2000), all published in the African Journal of Reproductive Rights, exemplify this trend.

Equally important is the emphasis on women's needs not from the alienating perspective of medical discourses, but from the viewpoints of women's own frames of reference. An interesting example of this research is Malika Ladjali's "Conception, Contraception: Do Algerian Women Really Have a Choice?" Methodologically very suggestive, the article is based on an interview conducted by Meredeth Turshen with Ladjali, an Algerian doctor whose commitment to women's rights increasingly politicised her health care work. Ladjali prefaces her discussion of a case study in the following way:

Following this line of thought foregrounding women's concerns are studies like Sai's "An Overview of Unsafe Abortion in Africa" (1996), Okonofua's "Preventing Unsafe Abortion in Nigeria" (1997) and Whitaker and Germain's "Safe Abortion in Africa: Ending the Silence" (1999).

2. AIDS Research

Not surprisingly, this has been a vast and expanding field from the late eighties. In her discussion of gender research in Uganda between the 1980s and the present day, Margaret Snyder identifies the high proportion of studies of women and HIV/AIDS in the first country to acknowledge the massive impact of the disease. Research from the nineties shows that women are particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infection and poor care when infected because of gender roles, the sexual behaviour that sanctions polygamy, extra-marital relations and multiple partners for men and the enormous work burdens that many women confront. Discussing her interviews with women in Nairobi, Long captures the gendered circumstances often obscured in considerations of regional or national patterns:

Intricately conveying the predicament of certain women in multiple networks of invisibility and subordination, Long's report sheds important light on the particular AIDS-related difficulties affecting many African women.

An important trend in the burgeoning research is the tracing of links between economic crises and turmoil and the devastating impact of the disease on women. The effects of structural adjustment policies and economic turmoil feature prominently in a collaborative study like Schoepf et al.'s "Gender, Power and the Risk of AIDS in Zaire" (1991). Focusing on the CONAAISSIDA Project in Zaire and the various community workshops it generated, this article was co-authored by five health workers and researchers. It highlights the need for the strategic direction of donor funding and considers how workshops prioritised participants' active learning, problem-solving and empowerment, rather than didactic methods. In their conclusion, the authors state: "AIDS prevention is both personal and political. Change to safer sexual practices involves much more than the adoption of an unpopular imported technology; it involves redefinition of gendered social roles and change in the socio-economic conditions that have contributed to the spread of AIDS in the region" (1991:202).

The most valuable work on AIDS therefore deals directly with particular policies, macro- and micro-level circumstances and undertakes careful fieldwork to elicit women's perceptions of their needs and challenges. Books that develop these approaches are Renaud's Women at the Crossroads: A Prostitute Community's Response to AIDS in Urban Senegal (1997) and Wallman's Kampala Women Getting By: Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS (1996). Many contributions to Bond et al's AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean (1997) pursue similar methodological approaches of interviewing women and highlighting the local and broader circumstances that have an impact on HIV/AIDS. Outwater's "Socioeconomic Impact of AIDS on Women in Tanzania" (1996) is also a noteworthy shorter study. Dealing with the particular difficulties faced by women, this study also carefully appraises their ability to develop coping mechanisms and strategies.

By the middle of the nineties, global research on women and AIDS had begun to insist on the need to centralise women and gender concerns in policy debates and decisions. In her introduction to the anthology, Women's Experiences with HIV/AIDS: An International Perspective, Lynellyn Long writes:

A study that reflects the global prioritising and contextualising of women's positions to set crucial agendas for African research is Pat McFadden's "Sex, Sexuality and the Problem of AIDS in Africa" (1992). Framing her study with the claim that AIDS forces us to rethink ways in which sex and sexuality are manifested in public and private spheres, McFadden discusses the far-reaching socio-political issues, racial and gendered prejudices and forms of behaviour and role conditioning that impinge on AIDS. One of her key arguments is that the medicalisation of AIDS prevents understanding of the socio-cultural circumstances that invariably affect its transmission, its prevention and the treatment of those infected. She also highlights gendered prejudices, showing, for example, how the bias towards men leads health care workers to detect only men's symptoms, so that women's symptoms are often perceived to be those of curable sexually transmitted diseases.

Much of her discussion deals with the meanings and implications of sex and sexuality. Her problematising of such issues as the conflation of fertility and sexuality for African women, the shrouding of sexuality in taboo for many Africans, the hierarchies that sanction men's sexual dominance and licence to have multiple partners, and the double standard of policing women's appearance and sexual behaviour intricately unpack the way sexuality has been played out. As a study which raises numerous issues and problems, this forty-page long article, although published almost a decade ago, provides invaluable pointers for ongoing research on women, gender considerations and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Reflecting dominant patterns of transmission through heterosexual relationships in Africa, the focus of feminist AIDS research in the nineties has increasingly fallen on theorising men and masculinities. Janet Bujra's work has been central here, and is rooted in her extensive fieldwork and research in Tanzania (2000a; 2000b). Using the concept of "multiple masculinities" to describe distinct forms of gendered behaviour and sexuality among African men, she deals squarely with the idea that masculinity is learned behaviour and therefore forms a site for activist intervention and change. Bujra clearly demonstrates the value of critical and detailed attention to masculinities for feminist research by drawing attention to the fact that the range of ways in which men and boys are taught to define themselves in relation to women, is crucial to understanding "femininity" and "gender".

The detailed analytical approach evident in Bujra's work develops Obbo's somewhat reductive claim that "men are the solution" (1993). It carefully demonstrates that progressive health care, enlightened government policies and strategies for preventing AIDS transmission among women cannot be guaranteed unless men's assumptions of social and sexual dominance, all of which undermine encouraging developments at other levels, are radically altered. Bujra's comprehensive study, "Targeting Men for Change: AIDS Discourse and Activism in Africa" (2000a) makes it evident that AIDS, as a disease which has consequences for men's very survival, is likely to prove an important galvanising site for urgent work on masculinity in Africa. Bujra suggests that scholarship, workshops and grassroots activism on AIDS are potential rallying points for encouraging re-evaluations and transformations in men's social behaviour and sexuality.

The prevalence of gender-based violence on the continent has sparked off a wave of advocacy-oriented research. Providing useful reviews of research, activism and policy, Jane Bennett, in her Preliminary Assessment of Current South African Research Being Undertaken (or completed) on Connections Between Gender-based Violence, Peace-Building and Development Initiatives in South Africa (1999) and December Green in Gender Violence in Africa (1999), show how definitions of gender-based violence, and especially its legal status as a human rights issue, underwent significant changes during the nineties. These changes have lent a new urgency to a rapidly expanding field.

Studies about particular countries or regions have reflected prevailing forms of gender-based violence. Southern Africa has generated a wealth of studies of rape, wife-battering and sexual harassment. These include, for example, Armstrong's "A Note on Several Aspects of Rape in Swaziland" (1986), Women and Rape in Zimbabwe (1990) and Culture and Choice: Lessons from Survivors of Gender Violence in Zimbabwe (1998). Countries like Egypt, the Sudan or Somalia have been the subject of work on female genital mutilation or war-related violence. Examples include Giorgis' Female Circumcision in Africa (1981), Clotilde Twagiramariya and Meredeth Turshen's "'Favours' to Give and 'Consenting' Victims: The Sexual Politics of Survival in Rwanda" (1998) and "Women Denounce Their Treatment in Chad", written by the Women's Commission of the Human Rights League of Chad in collaboration with Clothilde Twagiramariya and Meredeth Turshen (1998). These patterns indicate the constancy of violence towards women as an instrument of patriarchal control and subjugation, even though its forms may vary from context to context.

The most comprehensive recent study is Green's Gender Violence in Africa: African Women's Responses (1999), in which she draws on a range of feminist models that theorise women's struggles against violent acts in sub-Saharan Africa. Although impressively detailed, her study leans towards a pluralist and descriptive orientation. Bennett, reviewing trends in South Africa, draws attention to the intricate political assumptions and ideological views that underpin broadly "feminist" research and activism on gender-based violence (2000). She therefore signals the political inflection of research trends in ways that Green does not. Her attention to underlying politics is important in view of the extremely diverse forms of opposition to gender-based violence. Mechanisms range from CEDAW, intricately situated in global politics and multiple agendas, to a progressive feminist regional forum like the Emang Basadi Women's Association, which works closely with Botswanan women. Work to disaggregate research, policy-making and advocacy will help create effective platforms for strategic challenges to violence in different African contexts.

Green's book isolates violence in the family, violence in the wider society and the state's role in relation to violence. These provide useful categories for considering research trends. In what follows, I use these frameworks to review manifestations of gender-based violence and its treatment by researchers and activists.

As Green notes, although wife-battery is fairly prevalent in Africa, silence surrounds the practice in most parts of Africa. Important statistics are offered in sources like Human Rights Watch, although systematic attention to the practice remains scant. Ofei-Aboagye (1994) helps to explain this silence in her study of wife-battery in Ghana. Focusing on women's socially conditioned feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility in marriages, she shows how many women cannot perceive wife-beating as a form of injustice. Yet women's feelings of denial and self-blame for violence exist in all parts of the world. A fuller account of the relatively scant treatment of wife-battery in African research would need to address the institutional, political and research climate which has directly and covertly censored subjects for African feminist scholars and researchers. [19]

Despite the scarcity of analytical studies of wife-battery, data-collection and monitoring of the practice continues to grow. Organisations responsible for this include the Tanzanian Media Women's Organization (TAMWA), which has produced - among other forms of documentation -"Violence Against Women in Tanzania" (1993), Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), the Emang Basadi Women 's Association in Botswana, responsible for Rape in Botswana: Statistics, Profiles Laws and Consequences (1998), as well as Amanitare, a regional effort established in 1999 to advance work on domestic violence and women's sexual and reproductive health rights. The research undertaken by these organisations intersects with those of international instruments like CEDAW to create valuable resources for challenging domestic violence in Africa. An important venture involving universities in the southern African region is the Southern African Tertiary Education Network Challenging Sexual Harassment and Violence. This network has been coordinated by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, which, since 1996, built links with a range of southern African higher educational institutions to focus on policy design, disciplinary procedures, educational and advocacy tools, solidarity and the sharing of resources for combating sexual harassment and violence. Information about the network, as well as the report of its 1997 conference and its newsletter, is available from the website, http://www.uct.ac.za/org/agi/progproj/app/shnw.htm. A key publication, Sexual Violence/ Sexual Harassment (2002), linked to the work of the Network, has been written by Jane Bennett, Director of the African Gender Institute. The handbook, which offers theoretical explorations of gender-based violence, strategies for policy design, advocacy and workshops, discussion of key concepts and information about organisational, Internet and print resources, is a key example of the manner in which feminist scholarship can directly intervene into a fundamental site of gender struggle.

Unlike wife-battery, female genital mutilation (FGM) has been a popular and sensationalised subject in both western scholarship and lobbying, with much earlier work being shaped by racist stereotypes about African sexuality and violence. More recently, the confluence of racism and voyeurism in the western fixation with FGM has become the subject of much-needed critical intervention. Gunning, in her "Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminisms: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries" (1992), condemns the assumption that FGM can be reformed through civilising interventions from the west, while Pat McFadden, in a provocative recent article titled "Cultural Practice as Gendered Exclusion", angrily asks: "What is it that is so intriguing about the mutilated vaginas of poor peasant women in a remote village of the Sudan or the Casmance and why is it a matter of 'scholarly curiosity' rather than a violation of a woman's fundamental right to bodily and sexual integrity" (2001:62)? It is significant that efforts to reverse the colonial gaze have been prominent in other discussions of African women and health. These include studies that contextualise FGM, like Ahmadu's "Rites and Wrongs: An Insider/Outsider Reflects on Power and Excision" (2000), or Kassam's "Some Aspects of Women's Voices from Northern Nigeria" (1996). Also noteworthy is Fair's provocative The Body Politic, The Bodies of Women, and the Politics of Famine in US Television Coverage of Famine in the Horn of Africa (1996). Questioning the tendency to medicalise and feminise poverty, these contribute to a propitious clearing of the ground for progressive methodological and theoretical approaches to women's health priorities.

The danger with certain efforts to relativise women's experiences of violence is a tendency to "contextualise" cultural practices to such an extent that critical appraisal disappears. [20] Green, invoking Mohanty's caution that political meanings are always relative to different historical contexts, displays this tendency when she makes the astonishing claim that "Perhaps it can be claimed that the female bonding and organising associated with circumcision ceremonies have subversive aspects" (1999:16). Many scholars who combine rigorous contextual analysis with critical appraisal have therefore produced studies that are both critical and sensitive to cultural contexts. El Dareer's Woman, Why Do You Weep? (1982), the first book-length study of circumcision undertaken by a Sudanese woman, and Abdallah's Sisters in Affliction (1982), published in the same year, are important early examples of this work. Approaches that position FGM in relation to broader discussion of women's agency and general policy-making are also notable. For example, Karam's (1998) discussion of state non-interference in FGM in Egypt is connected to her perceptive discussion of women's agency and testimony, and of feminist engagement with Islamism.

These researchers have shown that FGM has been so charged a subject because of its connection to opposition to colonialism and neo-imperialism, and to the everyday gendered politics that prescribe women's roles of service to their communities. Overall, this research shows that the subject of FGM, like wife-battery, is sanctioned within domains considered inviolate and entirely separate from the broader community and the level of the state and the law. Assumptions about the sanctity of this domain - together with its "natural" laws and ideologies of gender and kin-based relations - pose particular challenges in analysing certain forms of violence against women as systemic political acts.

Consideration of gender-based violence in the wider society addresses the forces that affect and modify relationships between men and women, and specifically those forces that shape especially brutal forms of masculinity. When men confront precarious political and economic situations, they may seek some measure of control by "displacing" their rage and frustration onto women, and especially vulnerable women and girl children. Studies of rape and harassment have drawn on this observation to explain the high incidence of particularly brutal rapes and other forms of sexual violence in societies marked by socio-political upheaval.

Especially important work has been undertaken in South Africa, where critics like Vogelman (1990), Moody (1994), Campbell (1995, 2001) and Ratele (2001) have explored the "crisis of masculinity" in post-apartheid South Africa. The focus is on such factors as the legacy of apartheid brutality, massive unemployment among black men, high expectations after the first democratic elections, growing state support for gender justice, and the state's increasing encroachment into "private" heterosexual relations previously monitored solely by patriarchal authority within families. This analysis of structural reasons for the mounting brutality directed at, for example, girl children and elderly women, contributes enormously to understanding violence as an instrument for constructing gendered identity and power. A recent South African publication by Anne Mager and Blake, Masculinities in the Making of Gendered Identities (2001) squarely confronts this. The book is aimed specifically at trainers and explores the process of gendering in relation to practical work on transforming perceptions, behaviour and identity. Beyond South Africa, attention to the particular social circumstances that shape gender-based violence is evident in studies by scholars like Christine Obbo (Ghana) and Mukurasi (Tanzania). Their work transcends the radical feminist notion of a homogenous patriarchy, demonstrating the extent to which masculinities are culturally and historically constructed, and also, how they can be challenged and demystified.

Another area for considering gender-based violence revolves on the direct and indirect roles played by the state. Of importance here are ways in which the state may promote ideals of masculinised dignity and feminised sacrifice (Green, 1999: 74). This broadly gendered model of nation-state development inevitably frames the state's responses to domestic violence, rape and customary practices like FGM. Much feminist scholarship on the state has drawn attention to this problem. Karam (1998), Tamale (1999) and Mukurasi (1991), focusing on state strategies of non-interference, pinpoint the complicity of the post-colonial state with the gendered status quo. Charlton, Everett and Staudt (1989), and Gordon (1996) show how gender ideology may actively pervade the law. This can range from monitoring women by criminalising their "deviance" and policing their activities to ratifying gender stereotypes and crimes of sexual violence in legal systems. Lillian Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza's Women's Violent Crime in Uganda: More Sinned Against Than Sinning (1999) explores this invidious situation of women within the law. Describing the lack of legal recourse for women because of the gender biases built into the legal system, her case studies and analysis focus on the limited paths that women have for justice. The position of the state as a guardian of national morality means that the legal treatment of women in cases of gender-based violence profoundly influences popular conceptions of gender-based violence, a situation which, given the track record of most post-colonial states, creates a spiralling climate of licensed violence against women.

In an important recent study, Jane Bennett revisits the state's role to argue that "Until it is safer to confront gender-based violence (when solidarity around the need to eliminate it is rock-solid, and individuals have the full protection of allies and comrades), the need to approach abuses such as domestic violence, myriad forms of rape, sexual harassment and coerced sexual transactions must engage legal avenues" (2001:93). Bennett's study highlights the immensity of gender-based violence in Africa, as well as the difficulties faced by survivors who often rely on economically and politically precarious and alienating mechanisms. Her study neither upholds the idea that post-colonial states are committed to justice for women nor countenances the widespread co-opting of gender advocacy by the state; instead it astutely acknowledges the constraints of advocacy in the face of the enormity of gender-based violence. Such studies, which acknowledge the problematic nature of the state's control over gender initiatives, yet also confront the range of practical difficulties thrown up by women's efforts to deal with immediate and urgent problems, are key to scholars' efforts to build substantive and practical connections between research and activism.

As important in Africa as the state's complicity with the gender biases of the law and public morality is its role in relation to war-based gender violence and mass rape. Turshen and Twagiramariya's pioneering collection What Women Do In Wartime (1998) offers a range of studies dealing intricately with women's distinctive experiences of violence during war. Including work on Mozambique, South Africa, Chad, Rwanda and Liberia, this collection provides a wide-ranging overview of the massive consequences of war on women. Subjects such as sexual slavery, sexual torture and rape are often presented through life histories and personal testimony, with contributions exploring women's efforts to survive and resist the consequences of gendered violence during civil wars. A recent collection edited by Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen, The Aftermath: Women in Post-conflict Transformation (2002) deals comprehensively with war-related gendered violence in contexts including Eritrea, Nigeria, as well as Kosovo and Sri Lanka, with many contributions considering the extent to which women's solidarity and roles in new peace-building initiatives can intervene - as expressions of women's organised responses - into the gendered manifestation of war.

The high incidence of rape in escalating patterns of ethnic cleansing on the continent and the gendered demarcation of group boundaries have reached alarming proportions in contexts like Somalia and Rwanda. Women have been raped as part of what is now generally seen as a military strategy, rooted in definitions of women as frontiers, boundaries and symbols or mothers of ethnic groups. Understanding this practice and its effects would be enhanced by careful analysis of the connections between gendered constructions of ethnicity and nationhood and the gendered form of ethnic militarism and violence.

[19] The growth of discussions of sexuality or sexual abuse in the context of AIDS seems to be rapidly transforming this situation. Evidence of expanding research, organisation and advocacy work since the mid-nineties is surveyed in AMANITARE’s website (http//www.amanitare.org).

[20] Pat McFadden (2001) notes that the recent usage of the term female genital cutting, with commentators ostensibly seeking to capture certain cultural resonances, rather than female genital mutilation, amounts to the depoliticising of an act of violence.