Deadline for Abstracts: 30th June, 2024
All submissions and enquiries should be emailed to: contact@feministafrica.net (and copy) info@feministafrica.net
Issue Editors: Sethunya Tshepho Mosime, Deborah Atobrah and Penelope Sanyu
Introduction
In her book “Play Like a Feminist”, Shira Chess (2020)urges women to spend more time playing, as a tool of radical disruption against not only sexism but against all other intersectional forms of exclusion based on sexuality, religion, ethnicity, race and class. Along with many other indigenous knowledge systems, very few traditional African games and forms of play have survived the onslaught of modernity and development in the post-independence period. Although some traditional forms of play and gaming such as wrestling in Senegal and board games have survived, the majority of indigenous play cultures, particularly those of African women, have been disrupted and are now only occasionally performed at cultural festivals and events. Colonialism with its religious and patriarchal bias, imported with it the idea that Africans were lazy and frivolous by nature, as opposed to having purpose such as “to strive arduously for knowledge, for excellence and virtue, for fame and honor, for power and prosperity” (Fink, Saine, and Saine 1968,19). With a mission to discipline and civilize the African working class, colonial governments introduced the so-called organised sports to target them through schools, mine work, civil service, churches and armies. Young African women at mission schools were able to participate in sports such as tennis, field hockey, netball and basketball; however, for most, their involvement was short-lived and limited to their time in school (Sikes 2018). Seen as frivolity, traditional play and gaming are often contrasted with “serious and responsible activities” and not given their rightful place as basic and essential human phenomenon (Fink, Saine, and Saine 1968:19). For African women, traditional play cultures and gaming space were further drastically altered by the post-independence neo-colonial, and nationalistic ideas of womanhood that policed their bodies and denied them bodily autonomy (Mcfadden 2004).
Neo-liberal thinking and its preference for market solutions, and the advent of authoritarian States on the continent, led to a devaluation and diminishing of women’s space for play and playfulness, as well as a disproportionate burden of reproductive activities or care work on women. As production systems and economic policies failed to deliver a decent living to many, their burden of care work increased (Tsikata and Amanor-Wilks 2009). Also, over time, women’s experience of play and how it resonates with various aspects of their lives has evolved significantly, with likely predictors such as urbanity, education, marriage, and occupation.
The feminist response has been largely to undo the idea of feminine frivolity, often by disavowing women’s play, because “feminists have work to do…we have too much work to make time for play” (Chess 2020:6-7). This perspective has been so pervasive that according to Dutta (2022:403), “feminists, and feminisms, have [also] attained a…reputation or stereotype of being humourless and killjoys.” For African feminists, this has been compounded by the additional postcolonial humanitarian urgency of the situations that feminists work under; of failed States and flailing neo-liberal economies inundated with foreign debt; the legacy of structural adjustment policies, poverty, ethnic tensions, racism, militarism and sexism. It therefore is no surprise that play and gaming as feminist praxis have received very little attention in African feminist debates.
Read the full Concept Note and Call for Paper here.