The Women's naked protest, Dobsonville 1990: gender consciousness and the body politic

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Women: one chapter in the history of South Africa? A critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The TRC; Commissioning the Past, 11-14 June, 199

Gender governance and democracy : Southern and Eastern Africa

This paper addresses gender, governance and democracy in Eastern and Southern Africa following the democratic turn of the 1980s. It explores the gendered nature of power and authority in these post-colonial states and the kinds of gender governance practices instituted in the region in response to local, national and international demands for gender justice. While women’s representation and participation in governance increased, women are still among the poorest citizens, with the least opportunity for education and employment and statistically, the most likely to be subject to violent abuse and infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. Although women-friendly policies have been instigated, decision-making remains male dominated

Women's Activism in South Africa: Working Across Divides

Women's Activism in South Africa provides the most comprehensive collection of women's experiences within civil society since the 1994 transition. This book captures South African women's stories of collective activism and social change at a crucial point for the future of democracy in the country, if not the continent. Pulling together the voices of activists and scholars, South Africa's path to democracy and the assurance of gender rights emerge as a complex journey of both successes and challenges. The collection elucidates a new form of pragmatic feminism, building upon the elasticity between the state and civil society. What the cases demonstrate is that while the state itself may not be a panacea, it still represents a key source of power and the primary locus of vital resources, including the rights of citizenship, access to basic needs, and the promise of protection from genderbased violence - all central to women's particular needs in South Africa

Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

Post-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict

Gender, citizenship and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 24 April 1995Citizenship has become a fashionable topic for discussion amongst political theorists during the 1990s. This is not surprising, since this is the decade when Europeans have been debating in a single European Parliament a Europe with a single citizenship and a Europe with fluid boundaries. The fragmentation of the Soviet Union has created a plethora of new nation-states, as well as particularist identities which have created a desire for independent citizenship and sovereignty. In this changing context, the certainties about what 'citizenship' entails in terms of rights and obligations, both political and civil, have disappeared. In South Africa's first democratic election in April 1990, the electorate included all adults over eighteen years of age. Although the rights and obligations of citizens were not specifically debated during the negotiations, the reincorporation of former independent homelands and the extension of the vote to all adults over the age of eighteen implicitly suggested the acceptance of the notion of a universal citizenship. What debate there has been, has focused on 'effective democracy' as a means of creating citizenship. In the immediate period of transition, negotiations were concerned with creating institutional mechanisms, including the Transitional Authority to 'level playing fields' to enable all adults to vote in the" first elections