Online memes in Kenyan social media plat forms as a modality of negotiating gender-based violence in androcentric political contexts

This paper examines the re-production of images of gendered political bodies in digital scapes, and how these online forms participate in meaning-making of gender-based violence. The paper reads body images of (wo)men in politics, featured in online memes, as signs embodying society’s negotiation of gender-based violence in an androcentric political culture. It finds that both online and offline Kenyan political discourses generated by mainstream and subversive political discourses portray the female body as a subordinate category around which three notions of marginalisation are produced: the trivialised body, the violated body, and the sexualised body, all products of patriarchal and sexist biases. Online memes are of particular interest because they are means by which the current generation of young Kenyans engage in public discourses in ways that reflect ongoing popular discourses on gender in non-official publics

Polar subjects, perilous stories: Intricacies of narrating authentic warriorhood in Madikizela-Mandela's testimonials

The centrality of corporeal and embodied militancy in South African women’s political testimonials has scarcely been addressed in African testimonial criticism. Arguably, representations of women warriors have been overlooked because of the masculine nature of war discourse that imagines militancy as a masculine prerogative. Drawing on testimonial theories and criticisms on South African war narratives, this article examines representations of rhetorical militancy in testimonials of Nomzamo Winfreda Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela. Specifically, it seeks to interrogate how the act of witnessing intersects with claims to truth, a key testimonial imperative, in view of the polarity of the subject under study, a factor that renders her testimonial claims to truth perilous. The aim of this article is to analyse how women politicians’ witnessing of their personal struggles within domains otherwise constructed as domestic/private during and after war (in this case apartheid) serves as historical revisionist accounts of women’s war-time experiences. Further, these testimonials are read as re-signifying women’s everyday experiences under apartheid, as acts of (embodied) militancy. In other words, this debate examines how rhetorical militancy in the two testimonials demonstrates the narrator’s warriorhood

Negotiating public and private identities: A study of the autobiographies of african women politicians

Thesis (D.Phil)--Stellenbosch University, 2017.ENGLISH SUMMARY: This thesis examines autobiographies and memoirs of fifteen African women politicians and former politicians. These autobiographies are considered as part of a distinct sub-genre: African political autobiographies by women. Specifically, it interrogates how the African woman’s political autobiography represents the public and private subjective identities of African political womanhood. My argument is that the African woman’s political autobiography is a site where public and private conceptions of African political womanhood are (de)constructed. In reading these texts, I focus on how a merger between (Western) modes of narration prevalent in traditional (and masculine) autobiography and African narrative techniques drawn from women’s narrative practices in oral, visual, and written traditions (re)conceptualise the writers’ identities. The women writers’ discourses challenge the construction of womanhood in dominant ideological discourses like slavery, colonialism, apartheid, patriarchy, and religion, among others. These writings and my reading of them enter into conversation with African womanist (autobiographical) identity politics. In other words, I place African womanist perspectives of writers like Mary Modupe Kolawole and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi in conversation with the women-defined practices voiced in these autobiographies in order to suggest ways of reading and writing the African woman’s political autobiography. These debates allow us to consider how discursive practices as sites of knowledge production generate conceptions of African political womanhood that either silence or make visible African women’s political agency. The study finds that hybridity of the African woman’s political autobiography, its subject, and its discourse are in-between spaces from where the writers contest Western and patriarchal notions of womanhood that silence women’s agency.AFRIKAANS OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die outobiografieë en memoires van vyftien huidige en vroeëre Afrika-vrouepolitici. Die outobiografieë word as ’n duidelik definieerbare genre gesien, naamlik outobiogafiese skrywe deur Afrika-vroue in Afrika – dit verken spesifiek die mate waarin vroue in Afrika se politieke lewensweergawes hul publieke en private subjektiewe identiteite weerspieël. Ek voer aan dat hierdie werke ’n terrein bied waar publieke en private begrippe van Afrikavroue ge(de)konstrueer word. In my leeswerk het ek veral aandag gegee aan die samesmelting van (Westerse) tradisionele (en manlike) outobiografiese vertellings en hoe Afrikavertellingstegnieke eie aan vroue se verhaaltegnieke in orale, visuele en geskrewe tradisies die skrywers se identititeite (her)konseptualiseer. Die vroueskrywers bevraagteken die konstruksie van vrouwees in die dominante diskoerse van byvoorbeeld slawerny, kolonialisme, apartheid, patriargie en godsdiens. Hierdie geskrifte en my benadering tot hulle betree gesprekke met die (outobiografiese) identiteitspolitiek van vrouemeagtigingskrywers. Met ander woorde, ek plaas die vrouebemagtigings-aspekte van Afrika-skrywers soos Mary Modupe Kolawole en Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi in gesprek met die praktyke soos deur vroue in hierdie outobiografieë gedefinieer om die interpretering en die skrywe van Afrikavroue se politieke outobiografieë moontlik te maak. So ’n debat skep ruimte vir die oorweging van diskoerspraktyke, terwyl kennisgebiede wat begrip sal bevorder geskep word, veral dié wat Afrika-vroue se politieke stem òf verhul òf verhelder. Die studie bevind dat die hibridiese karakter van vroue se politieke outobiografiese werke, hul onderwerpe, en hul diskoers ’n tussengebied vorm waar skrywers Westerse en patriargale idees wat vroue se bemagtiging bedreig, kan aanspreek

Naming practices as a technique for rewriting African women into history

Although daughterhood is a gendered identity, often invoked in nationalist discourses to further nationalist agenda, its ‘private’ status is often silenced or misrepresented in public discourses. This article, however, examines how naming practices re/signify the private selves of Wambui Waiyaki Otieno and Wangari Muta Maathai, two Kenyan women politicians, as political. This re/signification is made possible by the two memoirists advancing names in their memoirs as a discursive technique for negotiating their public and private identities. The assumption guiding the argument is that the two narrators either identify with or reject certain names related to individuals, places, political movements, or cultural aspects with whom they identify as biological or ideological daughters. The article finds that the narrators neither valorize the private nor public aspects of their daughterhood. Rather, they foreground alternate facets of their public or private daughterhood to suit a specific purpose, depending on the desired agenda they wish to foreground

Polar subjects, perilous stories: Intricacies of narrating authentic warriorhood in Madikizela-Mandela\u27s testimonials

The centrality of corporeal and embodied militancy in South African women’s political testimonials has scarcely been addressed in African testimonial criticism. Arguably, representations of women warriors have been overlooked because of the masculine nature of war discourse that imagines militancy as a masculine prerogative. Drawing on testimonial theories and criticisms on South African war narratives, this article examines representations of rhetorical militancy in testimonials of Nomzamo Winfreda Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela. Specifically, it seeks to interrogate how the act of witnessing intersects with claims to truth, a key testimonial imperative, in view of the polarity of the subject under study, a factor that renders her testimonial claims to truth perilous. The aim of this article is to analyse how women politicians’ witnessing of their personal struggles within domains otherwise constructed as domestic/private during and after war (in this case apartheid) serves as historical revisionist accounts of women’s war-time experiences. Further, these testimonials are read as re-signifying women’s everyday experiences under apartheid, as acts of (embodied) militancy. In other words, this debate examines how rhetorical militancy in the two testimonials demonstrates the narrator’s warriorhood

The female body as a site of embodying personal and cultural memories in Nawal El-Saadawi’s autobiographies

Although the concept re/making the body is often conceived as denoting re-constructions of the material body, this paper expands this notion to include issues of embodiment. It analyses how the female body might serve as a textual strategy used to represent the embodiment of female trauma in autobiography. The paper therefore deconstructs and extends the boundaries of conceptions of re-making the body from previous pre-occupation with the physical body to include social constructions of the body. The focus is on two autobiographies by Nawal El Saadawi: A daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking through fire (2002). The paper highlights the theme of female body memory because trends in representations of gendered bodies in public discourses imagine the male as the mind and the female as a body to be defined and determined