European University Institute Library

Sexuality & gender politics in Mozambique, rethinking gender in Africa, Signe Arnfred

eng

index present

non fiction

Sexuality & gender politics in Mozambique

electronic resource

dictionaries

809771119

Signe Arnfred

Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks

rethinking gender in Africa

Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen. This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people's lives are not likely to succeed. The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women's organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] and secondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique. Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting 'culture and tradition'. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40% of Mozambique's population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for re-thinking sexuality and gender - in Africa and beyond. Signe Arnfred is Associate Professor, Dept of Society & Globalization, and Centre for Gender, Power & Diversity, Roskilde University.--, Provided by publisher

Introduction. Conceptions of gender and gender politics in Mozambique. Women in Mozambique: gender struggle and gender politics, 1987 -- Notes on gender and modernization, 1987 -- Family forms and gender policy in Mozambique 1975-1985, 1989-1990 -- Simone de Beauvoir in Africa: Woman -- the second sex?: Issues of African feminist thought, 2000 -- Conceptions of gender in colonial and post-colonial discourses, 2003 -- Night of the women, day of the men: meanings and interpretations of female initiation. Feminism and gendered bodies: on female inititation in Northern Mozambique, 2008 -- Moonlight and Mato: initiation rituals in Ribáuè, 1999 -- Wineliwa -- the creation of women: initiation rituals during Frelimo's Abaixo Politics, 1990/2000 -- Female initiation and the coloniality of gender, 2000/2010 -- Situational gender and subversive sex? African contributions to feminist theorizing, 2007 -- Implications of matriliny in northern Mozambique. Male mythologies: an inquiry into assumptions of feminism and anthropology, 2005 -- Ancestral spirits, land and food: gendered power and land tenure in Ribáuè, 1999 -- Sex, food and female power: on women's lives in Ribáuè, 2006 -- Tufo dancing: Muslim women's culture in Ilha de Moçambique, 1999 -- Epilogue