Page 33 - Research & Innovation Report 2020

HUMANITIES

Shifting how we think about

gender power

The SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imaginations is all about shifting how we think about
gender power and women’s contributions in the world.

“The Chair’s work includes generating research on the archive of need to draw on our courage and hope, and continuously work
African women’s intellectual and political work as key thinkers, to undo situations that instil fear, big and small. We need to keep
theorists and figures in the liberation struggle, decoloniality and opening the cracks until it collapses.”
transformation,” says Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola who took up
her appointment with the Centre for Women and Gender Studies She offers the example of young women being harassed by men.
in May 2020. The Chair was officially launched on 5 June 2021. “We see this happening in public all the time and we need to stop
minding our own business. We need to scream at the men to stop
The Chair is called ‘Imaginations’ because, as a professor of doing this. We need our assailants and oppressors to know that
literature, Gqola is interested in how the creative genres and women will not put up with this behaviour.
popular culture are sites of knowledge production and how they
nurture ideas that are disruptive of patriarchal culture.

The Chair has collaborations with colleagues throughout South
Africa, the continent and globe, such as the GendV Project based
at Cambridge University in the UK.

The first book to come out of the Chair is Prof Gqola’s, Miriam
Tlali, Writing Freedom, about the novelist, playwright, author and
activist against apartheid and patriarchy. In 1975, Tlali became the
first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel in English,
titled Muriel at the Metropolitan.

Gqola’s next book, Female Fear Factory, published in June 2021,
sets out to understand rape and rape culture, as she explains: “I
came up with the concept of ‘the female fear factory’ as a way of
describing how patriarchy uses fear to keep women controlled.
Fear is a very important mechanism through which women and
sexual minorities are socialised. We are conditioned to fear rape
and to think about rape as a possibility or inevitability. We modify
our behaviour to try and avoid being raped or assaulted but we
know we cannot completely avoid it.”

She uses the term “factory” because fear is an ongoing production
in relation to rape, homophobic violence, femicide and policing.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and
a femicide rate that is more than five times the world average.
Gqola explains that fear is pervasive and intrudes into the everyday
lives of women worldwide.

“My argument as a feminist is that we have to undo fear because
we can never undo rape culture without addressing the fear. So we Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola

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