Sexuality & gender politics in Mozambique : rethinking gender in Africa

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Sexuality & gender politics in Mozambique : rethinking gender in Africa

Signe Arnfred

James Currey, c2011

Other Title

Sexuality and gender politics in Mozambique

Available at  / 6 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

"In cooperation with the Nordic Africa Institute"--T.p. verso

Includes bibliographical references (p. 296-304) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Demonstrates shortcomings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa. Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen. This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people's lives are not likely to succeed. The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women's organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] and secondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique. Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting 'cultureand tradition'. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40% of Mozambique's population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for re-thinking sexuality and gender - in Africa and beyond. Signe Arnfred is Associate Professor, Dept of Society & Globalization, and Centre for Gender, Power & Diversity, Roskilde University

Table of Contents

Introduction Part I Conceptions of Gender and Gender Politics in Mozambique Women in Mozambique: Gender Struggle and Gender Politics, 1988 Notes on Gender and Modernization. Examples from Mozambique, 1990 Family Forms and Gender Policy in Mozambique, 1990 Simone de Beauvoir in Africa: Woman - The Second Sex?: Issues of African Feminist Thought, 2001 Conceptions of Gender in Colonial and Post-colonial Discourses, 2004 Part II Night of the Women, Day of the Men: Meanings and Interpretations of Female Initiation Feminism and Gendered Bodies: On Female Inititation in Northern Mozambique, 2008 Moonlight and Mato: Initiation Rituals in Ribaue, 2000 Wineliwa - the Creation of Women: Initiation Rituals during Frelimo's Abaixo Politics, 1990 Female Initiation and the Coloniality of Gender, 2010 Situational Gender and Subversive Sex? African Contributions to Feminist Theorizing, 2008 Part III Implications of Matriliny in Northern Mozambique Male Mythologies: An Inquiry into Assumptions of Feminism and Anthropology, 2006-2007 Ancestral Spirits, Land and Food: Gendered Power and Land Tenure in Ribaue, 2001 Sex, Food and Female Power: On Women's Lives in Ribaue, 2006-2007 Tufo Dancing: Muslim Women's Culture in Ilha de Mocambique, 2004 Epilogue

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top