by Tinashe Mawere Introduction: Zimbabwean nationalism and gendered identities Broadly, the literature of nations and nationalism neglects the question of gender (Walby 1997) while nation-gender theories still lack the impetus to provide a comprehensive analysis of how the complex interrelations of gender and nation add to the (re)production of nationalism (Smith 1998) as well as […]
By Vickashnee Nair (2021)[i] Exploring the phenomenon of ‘gender reveal parties’ on Google and social media platforms quickly immerses audiences in overwhelming seas of blue and pink. The ‘gender reveal’ trend is replete with gender stereotypes, creating a spectacle of gender performance where expectant couples (most commonly middle-upper class and heterosexually-identified) take centre stage in […]
by Shalate Belinda Pakati “Women need to understand that it’s okay for a married man to be in a sexual relationship with more than one woman” … Hearing a woman say this on a radio show recently made me feel very angry. I was also confused about what she was suggesting with these words…I found […]
By Tinashe Mawere, Henri-Count Evans & Rosemary Musvipwa Introduction: Re/thinking climate change Gendered scripts, gendered identities and gendered hierarchies are evident in the everyday. Gender is not inborn, but is procreated; and gendered meanings are made practical and visible through performances of the mundane (Butler 1988; Beauvoir 2010). Climate change has become an everyday discourse from […]
Next year it will be forty years since the first stories of a new illness, seemingly only affecting gay men in New York, started to circulate. It was called GRID then – gay related immune deficiency – a grim reminder that conflating sexual orientation, morality and disease was second nature to society. Later, we came […]
by Tinashe Mawere Introduction: Contextualizing the Zimbabwean land question In Zimbabwe, land became a prominent political and ideological issue after colonisation in 1890; catalysed by the ‘invading’ masculine British South Africa Company (BSAC) and its violent ‘penetration’ and appropriation of land. The physical and symbolic violence that can be associated with land ‘invasion’ is gendered […]
by GS Pinheiro *Please note, this essay contains descriptions of sexual violence In this short piece, I offer some personal thoughts and reflections around the notion of “violence”. The writing centres on my own associations with the word, and some personal instances of normative and bodily violences that I have experienced, with particular focus on […]
by Hulisani Khorombi The United Nations Refugee Agency defines a refugee as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. Most likely, they […]
By Hulisani Khorombi Background The World Health Organisation estimates that 3 million girls, residing in only 30 countries, mainly in Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Asia, are at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) every year[1]. Historically, an estimated 120 million girls and women have undergone FGM, and approximately 2 […]
by Belinda Pakati A large body of women simply abandoned the notion of sisterhood. Individual women who had once critiqued and challenged patriarchy re-aligned with sexist men. Radical women who felt betrayed by the negative competition between women often simply retreated. And at this point, feminist movement which was aimed at positively transforming the lives […]