The impact of the changing funding and development landscape on an already closed space for transformative women’s rights, the fundamentalist backlash against women’s rights, shrinking spaces for e...

abstractThe adoption of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action (1994), brought sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) under the attention of the international community. International law standards recognise the need to create an enabling legal environment that ensures that adolescent sexual and reproductive rights are realised. These standards include, for instance, setting an age at which adolescents can access contraceptives without parental consent, and facilitating the provision of family planning services to adolescents. This article employs a feminist approach to critiquing the protections available to the SRHR of adolescents in Eastern and Southern Africa. It explores the current legal approaches to the protection of the SRHR in international and regional instruments and examines the way they are implemented in the regions. The article establishes that while broad frameworks exist under the international and regional frameworks, reference to the specific rights issues facing adolescents is limited. It also shows that while the international guidance is premised on the principles of gender equality, it fails to provide a holistic approach that the domestic jurisdictions can follow. The article concludes with views on the role of the law in promoting adolescent sexual and reproductive health from a gender-sensitive perspective. Feminist jurisprudence is used as the theoretical framework throughout the article.

abstractPositive shifts in the global policy landscape have contributed to situating gender equality at the centre of programmes to address HIV, advance sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and eliminate violence against women and girls. Achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – in particular Goals 3: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” and 5: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” (United Nations, 2015) – requires new strategies and new thought leadership. Gender activists and feminists have mobilized to make their voices heard on the issues that matter to them on the virtual #WhatWomenWant platform. Girls and young women mobilizing around HIV and SRHR want a new paradigm to hold governments accountable to the commitments they have made. This profile briefly considers the shifts in the policy environment and implications for gender equality and argues for a new accountability paradigm in which young women and girls in Eastern and Southern Africa are leaders and agents in the change they want.

abstractHere I reflect on my personal journey at what I call “the most disadvantaged university campus in South Africa” – Tshwane University of Technology Soshanguve Campus. I want to explore what makes it appear to be more violent than all the other higher learning institutions, why there is so much student protest, the gender roles in student protest, and protesters’ view on feminist theory. I also want to reflect on my introduction to feminism and how I learnt to embrace the word. To me feminism means that as a Black woman no one should dictate on how I am to live my life or how I must behave, because that is what my gender requires or entails of me. It means that the society can never expect me to carry myself to fit their expectations. At this age I still find the term ‘gender roles’ so foreign.Feminism has been influential to my activism. I discovered that all the student protest that takes place there is led by male students and student organisations are dominated by males; in all the meetings we hold males are always more opinionated than female students, and male students continue to be in more powerful positions than women. Me being so outspoken and taking the forefront when protesting is seen as a taboo; I am labelled as an ‘attention seeker’ and as very disrespectful towards men just because I can stand up for myself and the other women. Some females also view me like that. In this perspective piece I seek to write about my journey in student activism and learning more about the feminist theory.

abstractIntimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious global issue that mainly affects women. Power and control are among the driving forces behind IPV, and are endorsed within conservative gender regimes that constitute the social ecologies within which women live and love. Socially constructed ideals of love contribute to women’s commitment to forming and remaining in relationships, even if they are abusive. This article draws on data from a study carried out at a selected South African university campus. It highlights evidence of resilience amongst female students through their questioning and redefinition of love in the context of IPV. In this qualitative study, 15 female students were purposefully selected because they live at the campus residences. The main methods of generating data were focus group discussions and individual semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that young women are alert to love being a gendered discourse that contributes to the prevalence of, and the maintenance of IPV. Specifically, in this study, some of the young women demonstrated resilience by rejecting commonly held disempowering notions of romantic love that many women are invested in, and instead redefined their meanings of love in a less self-sacrificing way.

abstractViolence against women is extremely prevalent in South Africa, with one of the highest levels of reported rape world-wide. This article highlights the voices of young women who experienced fear and violation in South Africa, more specifically their acts of resistance in the face of adversity and their process of resilience. The article is based on research which explored how women’s lives and identities are transformed by living in violent spaces, such as South Africa. The research adopted a biographical-interpretive methodology and drew on psychosocial and narrative theory, as well as literature surrounding the social-ecological systems approach of resilience and research on resistance. Free-association narrative interviews were conducted with 27 female university students in Cape Town and narrative theory was used to analyse the interview texts. The article draws on the interviews of three of these women. Findings reveal how these women are not just ‘victims of patriarchy’ but are agentic beings capable of acts of resistance and demonstrating resilience in the face of violence and adversity. Situating the women’s narrative responses to the violence within their social ecologies reveals firstly, the importance of women’s agentic selves, and secondly, the critical limits on an over-reliance on women’s individual strengths and resilience. It is argued that it is neither just nor sustainable to expect women to carry the individual responsibility for sexual violence alone. Instead, the burden rests on society to remedy the high level of incidence of sexual violence with which women live.

abstractThis article examines how Judy Kibinge in Something Necessary (2013) engages with the subject of sexual violence during the post-election violence in Kenya. It focuses on how Kibinge rethinks the filmic representation of rape, not as a recount of pain and violence but as a useful resource for developing resilience in youth, within the larger social-ecological system. Kibinge does this in three ways: first by speaking about rape through the inclusion of rape in the film, second by the ways in which the victim handles the pregnancy from the rape and third by the representation of one of the perpetrators as a transformative agent who represents the possibility of men triumphing over oppressive patriarchal norms. I undertake a content and textual analysis of the characterisation in Something Necessary to identify how resilience can be nurtured through the film as a cultural production that counters the culture of impunity and normalisation of sexual violence

abstractBased on an empirical study of marital dissolution, this article explores the race, class, and gender dimensions of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (120 of 1998) (RCMA). Drawing on data from court (divorce) files and semi-structured interviews, it provides an intersectional critique of the laws for customary wives who seek to regulate marital dissolution through both judicial and extra-judicial systems. The article focuses specifically on the financial consequences of the dissolution of a customary marriage, one of the main criticisms of the Act. The RCMA was supposed to improve the entitlements of women in customary marriages; however, this study found that in practice the law is of little use to most poor, rural-based black South African women whose lives are far removed from any interaction with the state or norms generated by it. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, the rhetoric of rights and the provision of rights overlook the failure of the state to assist individuals in claiming the rights, and secondly, the strong belief held by divorcees and traditional leaders that marital assets belong to the husband (and husband’s family or the marital family as it pertains to children) leads to resistance to an equal division of marital assets. The authors argue that a more dedicated and systematic effort which uses intersectionality in thinking about institutional transformation is required to curb financial exploitation upon the dissolution of a customary marriage.

abstractThis briefing provides a feminist interpretation of food consumption in Blantyre, Malawi, drawing primarily from participatory group discussions with a variety of residents. In these discussions participants were asked to name foods and then categorise them as rural, urban or both rural and urban, and then as for men, women or children. The result is an extensive list of foods categorised in a way that provides insight into the signification of these foods in constructing and expressing Malawian urban identities in intersecting socio-spatial, gendered, and generational terms. We link the findings to wider discussions about the ‘nutritional transition’ taking place in urban Africa and show that the food categories that support this linear model of social change – traditional/modern, rural/urban, natural/processed, local/global – do not reflect the reality of hybridised food cultures in Blantyre. Changing diets are far more nuanced and complex than the dietary transition thesis suggests, being intricately bound up with identities and culture, as well as personal preference, economic necessity, and ecological capacity. Whereas economic factors play a central role in conditioning food choice, our focus on urban residents’ perceptions of different foods sheds light on the socio-cultural factors that shape urban food systems. This is an important contribution to debates on how to promote sustainable food security in Africa’s urbanising communities.