by Charmaine Pereira and Jane Bennett
Editorial
The theorisation of exploitative and dangerous systems such as patriarchy or colonialism has long been energised by the complex and evolving connections among gender, violence, and power. Research and activism that acknowledge such connections point to ways in which these systems often create normalised conditions of vulnerability, especially for people gendered within the “feminine.” Such theorisation has arisen most influentially in political work within civil societies that prioritises narratives of “abuse against women” as a starting point for redress, resistance, and revolution. The overwhelming focus on such abuses in African contexts has remained, however, on domestic violence and sexual assault. In the past decade, the focus has also increasingly included the narratives of people gendered as women who are caught up in conditions of war and refugeehood. At the same time, the political worlds in which, for example, Ellen Kuzwayo wrote Call Me Woman (1985, published midway through South Africa’s State of Emergency), or Nawal El Saadawi published her best-known book, Woman at Point Zero (1975 in Beirut),1 have changed dramatically. Both books explore the multiple and interlaced abuses of women by husbands/fathers and state systems, but the narration of such interlocked abuses cannot be assumed to be the most insightful lenses for contexts some 50 years later.
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