Douglass Hunt Lecture: Feminist and African: Women’s Resistance to Gendered Pacification

Africa’s postcolonial states continue to exhibit profound contradictions in the arena of gender politics. While women’s movements have successfully pursued a great many legal and policy reforms, the implementation of new laws and policies remains very challenging, as state structures often lack the will and the capacity, or worse, work to appropriate and subvert real change. Yet feminism continues to spread on the continent, constituting an intellectual and political force for freedom that challenges the ongoing exploitation and oppression of women on a variety of fronts. In previous work I address the contribution of feminist women to the theory and practice of women’s movements. In this lecture I present some examples of bridging strategies that seek to push the frontier of change through new activist research collaborations. Today’s academic publishing reiterates Western hegemony in feminist knowledge production, even in the field of African studies. What are the possibilities for transnational feminist solidarity, in the context of the deepening North-South inequalities exposed by the global climate crisis, border controls, and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic?