Feminist Studies
Feminists Organising — Strategy, Voice, Power
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Across the African continent, and from pre-colonial times to the contemporary era, women have organised to further their interests in social, cultural, political and economic domains (see e.g. Daymond et al., 2003; Sutherland-Addy and Diaw, 2005). The fact of women’s organising is one of the many motifs featuring in the vast panorama of the Women Writing Africa project, a project that set out to retrieve the buried voices of women in their varied responses to the social and political forces in their lives. Such retrievals entail considerable organising and imagination in themselves, involving multiple planes of thought and collective action. How has contemporary feminist organising in Africa addressed the nexus of strategy, voice and power? A longstanding focus of activism has been feminist engagement with political parties and the state, with a view to increasing women’s political participation.1 Political power is privileged as a zone for amplifying women’s access to voice and decision-making. The extent to which women — elected on the platform of political parties very often hostile to women’s presence — are able to address feminist priorities in their political careers, is a recurring question. Strategies such as affirmative action for women have been championed with varying degrees of success, pointing to the limits of political representation. Inclusionary, reformist strategies Editorial | 17 that target women’s political inclusion have been differentiated from radical transformational strategies that challenge power more broadly (Hassim, 2005). Elaine Salo (2005) argues that both inclusionary and transformational strategies are necessary, given the complex character of the struggles involved and the varied texture of gendered movements.
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- : Feminist Africa., 2017
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English
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