Call for Proposals to Join a Research and Publishing Consortium
Deadline Extended for Submissions: 31st July, 2022
African feminists have been engaged in struggles around violence against women for decades. As one of the most longstanding themes of feminist concern, the subject has been a focus of theory as well as activism across the continent. Awa Thiam’s1 ground breaking research across West Africa highlighted the varied forms of violence that women endured at the hands of husbands, fathers, brothers, other family members and other women. Thiam’s analysis located the normalisation of such violence within interlocking axes of power – sex, race, and class – which needed to be subverted as a whole, rather than prioritising one over the others. In the 1980s and subsequently, although the question of violence against women was widely viewed as socially taboo, the work of a number of organisations and scholars ensured that the subject was placed on the political agenda. Since 1988, the Tanzanian Media Women’s Association, (TAMWA) had been engaging the public through their magazine Sauti ya Siti (Women’s Voice) on the numerous challenges that women faced on social, reproductive as well as economic fronts. TAMWA was the first organisation to set up a Crisis Centre in Dar es Salaam to take up the cases of women who had faced sexual harassment, violence and discrimination.2 December Green’s3 research drew attention to the range of struggles that African women were engaged in, opposing gender violence through formal as well as informal power structures. Green conceived of gender violence in terms of multiple layers operating in the domains of the family, the economy and the state.
Read the full proposal here