The conceptual framework of feminism

The conceptual framework of feminist movementThe conceptual framework of feminism, as a reactionary ideology, basic aloney consists of index finger, fair sex, rights, and equality. The same cigargont be said of African feminism, which has on its priority list such(prenominal) goals as self-determination, which have economic overt unmatchables sew on a materialistic metaphysic. African char cleaning womanism, de hatred its pretensions to seeking co-operation or its advocacy for interdependency between men and women, uses a model of conscientisation of women that is foreign to Africa, and runs the risks of obscurantism, vulgarism, inauthenticity, and irrelevance. To jell it cryptically, African womanism cant want and cant non want men at the same time. Although sexual activity has made tremendous strides in conscientising women about their quandary vis--vis male-dominance, its future in Africa requirements that it re-position itself appropriately. At least it must re-think thr ee theories, that is, the labour theory, economic theory, and neighborly theory.Africas coetaneous socio-political scene depicts theoretical and practical confusion of grammatical sexual activity with feminism or, for that matter, gender with broad emancipatory movements, such as African womanism, which nonetheless use gender theory as an intellectual tool for critical summary for the supposedly discriminatory friendly, religious and political organisational structures. Feminist thinkers loathe these structures because they see in them deliberate mechanisms for oppressing or marginalising women. This oppression of women characterises the present economic inegalitarianism in a male-dominated status quo. Consequently, it is argued that these male-founded and male-dominated structures can only be changed so as to render them balanced or equitable if and only if r developingary measures ar employed. The usual elements of such arguers form a class of people called womens rightist ideologues. Feminist ideologues are those people, male and female, minority or majority in one country, who share the ideas or beliefs or attitudes of male-dominance over women. They tend to look at society in one way they are certainly unhappy, dissatisfied and critical of what they see most them as compared to what they would like to see. The rational justification of their dis glut and critical attitude is quite another thing. Insofar as feminism comprises people, who share one hard-boiled of ideas or Where is the Foundation of African gender?beliefs or attitudes as a group or community and who are ( groundworkly) organised, feminism is an ideology,1 which is posited to displace the prevailing male-dominated ideology. It is the meat of an ideology or the ideological core, which is the most difficult part to change because it is the worldview of the people. The ideological core consists of the core ideas, core beliefs, or core attitudes of a people. By implication, if the co re ideas, beliefs, or attitudes are purged out then the peoples practical existentity is annihilated. The revolutionary spirit is germane to any feminist ideologue because he or she believes that lasting and effective change must be moral and intellectual. These detested moral and intellectual values are in-built in society so that their remotion or reduction calls for a drastic revolutionary overhaul of the whole social fabric. This drastic revolutionary overhaul of society must be no less than a critique of the prevailing ideology because it purports to survey to intellectual scrutiny, and lastly refute or reject prevailing ideas, beliefs, or attitudes, which are rationally unjustified or prejudicial to the position of women in society. And then feminist ideology purports to create its avouch better ideas, beliefs, or attitudes. In other words, feminist ideology creates its own counter-consciousness, and eventually its own counterculture. This counterculture comprises a new set of beliefs and a new style of life that is intended or hoped to challenge and eventually expose the inadequacy of the prevailing culture. Only when the ideological core of the prevailing culture is removed and replaced by a new ideological core can lasting and effective change occur. Any change less than that involving the ideological core is superficial or transitory.In a nutshell, feminism challenges the prevailing status quo and develops a counter-ideology that questions the prevailing status quo and then attempts to modify it. Feminism advocates change rather than order. It criticises the regime in power and existing social and economic arrangements. It advances schemes for restructuring and grade society. It generates political movements in the form of womens movements in order to gain enough power and influence to effect the changes it advocates. Feminism is an ideology of action for it motivates people to demand changes in their lifestyles and to modify the existing social, religious, political, and economic dealings. It also mobilises its followers and adherents to preserve what they value.2 Ultimately, feminism is political and revolutionary. The revolutionary tinge of feminism has historically at quantify sanctioned the use of violence,3 which has not precluded bloodshed. gender thinking adopts this feminist stance, with little or no modification or retouching and with few or no disclaimers, so that it is conventional gender thinking to posit men as the perpetrators of female-oppression and discrimination in a society which is viewed as male-dominated, a society in which this heavyhearted scenario is ingrained in the fabric of the prevailing political regimes, and where the social, religious, political and economic relations and structures are arranged so as to embrace and promote disagreement between men and women. The result is that the gender paradigm centrally addresses the problems of equality and liberty rights, to a greater extent or le ss zeroing on a variant of welfare-state ideology. sexual urge thinkers see no need to take caution in acknowledgeing gender-ism from feminism. Feminism is taken for granted as the appropriate seed and vehicle of gender. In present-day(a) literary circles, the philosophical presuppositions of gender thinking and practice are not put to a litmus test because testing gender implies testing feminism, which, in any case, has withstood many a crucial test as evidenced by its record of persistence and triumph especially in Europe, Great Britain, America, Canada, and Australia. This being the case, the cogency of popular gender-isms can only be tested, or critiqued, against cross-cultural objectivity. This paper argues that the lack of demarcation between gender and feminism leads to confusion of western feminism with gender. By grounding itself in feminist ideology, gender inherits most of the weaknesses and short alights of western feminism. Gender finds its impetus and modes of exp ression in western feminism. Therefore, Africa needs to afterthought a specific gender, which is appropriate to the African situation in this new millennium.Conceptual analysis of gender and feminism becomes a problem for a set down because there is a plethora of such offers on the contemporary intellectual and political scenes. Below, only extant literature is reviewed on the question of gender and feminism in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa. In the case of Malawi, only a few example paper are considered. Any other contributions outside these papers are nonetheless worthwhile but very likely to be implicitly implicated and/or critiqued in one or more of the representative papers. The choice of the papers is free and deliberate social philosophy, education, religion, and environment, i.e., unarguably, some of the hottest beds of gender debates and activism.At this juncture, it should be appreciated that African intellectuals have for some time assay to conceptualise gender and f eminism in their own situation. As far as philosophical writing is concerned in Malawi, Hermes Chidammodzi was116 Where is the Foundation of African Gender?the first to notice and then critique this confusion between gender and feminism in the mid-nineties.Feminism is a consecration of the moral and intellectual and hence planetary values of equality purportedly denied of women by the dominance of males over women and the sacrosanct ideologies developed in society to legitimatise and perpetuate male-dominance. Thus conceived, feminism as a western reactionary and sacrosanct ideology is not African in origin and development so that the contemporary gender idiom is not a full theoretical framework and expression of the paradigm of African gender. This construing of gender invokes three important thoughts (1) Gender does not mean and is not women. (2) Gender emerges in a specific situation depicting inegalitarianism embedded in social structures where one sex (male or female) is on th e losing side. (3) Gender is a social construct of sets of behaviours, dispositions, ideas, beliefs, values, and attitudes of man and woman. (4) Gender has a strong materialistic tendency, for it suit womens qualities or modes of action in womens daily lives in a spatio-temporal-specific resource ungenerous presumably conditioned by a sexual division of labour. Insofar as it is situationally embedded in the societys power relations, gender is a reaction to constructed, i.e. real or imagined, male- dominance and female subordination. Gender thus conceived becomes an outgrowth from feminism.28 The record of feminism is marked by two goals equality and rights. Pioneer American feminists like Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton had to battle it out with men for their right to vote as equals with men by dint of creation. In the days of old, liberalism provided the initial momentum toward the release of women from social bondage. To womens disappointment, many a revolution (like the Am erican Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789) and nationalism did not specifically rescue them from subjugation by men. Social inequalities continued to prevail in the new and independent states. Britain, America and the Continent of Europe clearly illustrate the sluggish pace of women liberation go up Switzerland is the last European democracy to grant women suffrage in 1971.Despite the universality of female subordination and male domination, the African womans situation is bound to chafe her suspicious of western feminist discourse, which is mostly the consume of the twentieth century middle-class woman in an industrial sexual division of labour. For the western woman of that era it was only natural for her to cry for balance of power. The feminist fight was a fight for power. She made lots of gains her emancipatory efforts bore her more equality with men, more rights, and easier access to resources, increase in opportunities or incentives, especially in the co mmon sphere.The yardstick was always her more privileged male counterpart in the al acquirey privileged middle-class. In labour, this historicity of western feminism has led to the misconception that women were solely fighting for the soft or top jobs such as company executive, manager, prime minister, parliamentarian, physician, intelligence service editor, professor, pilot surprisingly, the women never zealously fought for rough jobs such as undertaker, trench-digger, dockyard worker, heavy industrial worker, soldier,30 or night-guards.In its counter-critique, western feminism penetrated the rough jobs eventually, the west precept more women engineers, women soldiers, and policewomen, thus virtually transforming western society into a unisex club. In the inter-war period, and much more vehemently after W.W.II, feminist thinkers zeroed on join as the champion of female subordination, and so they strongly argued that the demolition of the marriage institution would automatically lead to total women liberation. It was then a normal spectacle for a woman feminist to be decidedly non-married, although she could be attached and have children. Domesticity, child rearing, or whatever family life stands for, was looked upon as an impediment to women involvement and affair in public life, especially to public employment. The feminist propaganda so narrowly construed was reduced to a feminist fight for space and time in the public spheres of life especially the workplace, which was supposed as a predominantly male territory. Two concepts dominated and still dominate the western conceptual framework.Western gender categories dismally fail to provide a gender conceptual framework for the African woman. For instance, the category of power cannot be used to conceptualise gender in Africa. To argue that a certain normative concept like power has a gender meaning is to claim that its social usage, at least in part, is not what it ought to be for reasons that have to do w ith gender To claim further that the usage does not command universality and objectivity, receivable to considerations of differing hermeneutics, i.e. interpretation as grounded in historicity and context is not to advocate gender scepticism. Although the empirical realities of women world-wide are different, this paper argues for the abandonment of gender exclusivity in the face of equally competing, urgent and appealing discourses of, say, ethnicity, racism, and class.In western traditional masculinist literature, power is viewed as repressive, poured from a leviathan above to his subjects below. The subjects are said to need the powerful leviathan because without him, they lack security, peace and well-being. In that western literary world, power is evidently and firmly associated with the male and masculinity, like virility, thus evoking the physicality of power. The correlate of man, woman, is therefore powerless.So when feminists wrote about power over our bodies and power of our lives they were victimisation the very same concept of power, which pervaded traditional masculinist discourses on power. They affirmed the male expression of power rather than providing an alternative. It comes to us as no surprise that contemporary gender thinkers mimic the same masculinist notion of power in theorising gender. They are not wary of historical, social and political situation of knowledge-claims.32 Trapped in their own ideological cocoon, the western feminist women still think that western rationality is the only rationality that western science is superior to other forms of rationality (if any), so that in regard to, say, family planning strategy, African women have to be helped by their more scientific counterparts from the west.African women, so claim the western women, need to be conscientised because it is feared that the African women have internalised the oppression or suffering and therefore are in desperate need of awareness campaigns by women animat ors from the west. The western feminists already fall prey to the yet another ideology of dominance they vehemently fight in their own backyard.Western feminists are totally oblivious to the reality of subject-object relations in research the reality the helper and the helped are equals as they each experience the other from the viewpoint of their own situations and background knowledge and cultures. Each one (the helper and the helped) is the object of experience of the other so that objectivity is somehow tainted with subjectivity.31 Oshadi Mangena argues likewise that if one is attentive to contrasts of ethnic origin, sexual taste and class, the notion of gender disintegrates into fragments and cannot anymore be employed as a useful category. See K. Lennon and M. Witford, Knowing the difference feminist perspectives in epistemology, London Routeldge and Kegan Paul, 1994, pp. 275-282.32 Annette Fitzsimons and Susan Strickland, Ibid. pp. 124 265.129 Nordic Journal of African Stud iesThat the helper enjoys the exclusive right to the objectification of knowledge of the Other is an ingrained feature of western cross-cultural research, after all the helper has scientific skills or rational advantage over the helped, and this ontological arrangement make the helped redundant in the objectification of knowledge of the Other. The only danger though is that the consequent helpers knowledge is partial or fragmentary. The implication is that western feminists cannot emancipate the supposedly un-conscientised African women.2.2.2 WomanJust as the concept of benignant, as narrowly presented in western literature, fails to command objectivity, the same literature fails to define woman. Woman is amenable to many different things it is shrouded by ambiguities about its ontological status. It can advise intrinsic characteristics, like caring and love, but this smacks of essentialism, which does not have many adherents in gender mainstreams. It can also evoke familial relat ionships as the non-male member. both of these evocations partially conceive woman for they are normative since they are descriptive of a set of social facts or relations. As such, woman has no characterizable content and hence the challenge from postmodernist thought that woman is not descriptively adequate since, it is observed, woman is cross-culturally different.According to postmodernists, woman imposes unity over empirical reality.33 Postmodernism rejects the judiciousness and the humanist presumptions of wonders of reason. The Enlightenment is rejected because of its veneration of masculine reason at the expense of sensuality humanism is rejected because of its appeals to universal subjectivity or the human condition. Instead of seeking sameness postmodernism celebrates difference, partiality and multiplicity. It detests the search for coherence and hankering after the right (or Platonic or Kantian) solution.Postmodernist feminism equally opposes a hermeneutic parochialism o f the present over the past or vice versaof searching for a single given goal, a single representation of reality. This new shop of feminism transcends the historicist recognition of the inevitable peculiarity and contextuality of human thought and practice and hence it advocates the continuity of converse between interlocutors, between text and interpreter, and between subject and object, with no advantage, marked goal or reality. This postmodernist re-orientation of feminism is a deliberate step away from essentialism and universalism marginalisation and exclusion of the Other.34 It puts emphasis on specialty and multiplicity with due attention to difference, diversity and locale. But postmodernists also impose a tough demand on gender thinkers why should the absence of facts for33 See Alessandra Tanesini, Ibid. pp. 211-212.34 See Susan Strickland, Ibid. pp. 266-7.130 Where is the Foundation of African Gender?description of woman precludes the claim for the notion of woman, eve n where the self-will of the notion may not warrant the description or analysis of the same? fifty-fifty the points of convergence of feminism and postmodernism are not adequate grounds for their formulation of their purported common aims because their concept-lingualities are different. For example, their meanings of a concept like difference are different. In postmodernism, difference is acknowledged as typical of human experience worldwide it is at the same time evaded as a threat to dominant perspectives of understanding or interpreting reality. It is consistent within postmodernism to demonstrate that woman was all along acknowledged as different but was included in universal humanity in name only by the commanding men. Feminists believe that the dominant ideology in world history is the root cause of the subjection of women by men. In Rousseaus language of right, the emancipation of western woman, albeit perceptibly incomplete as we enter the third millennium, began as late as mid nineteenth century.However, feminism does not argue for the mere acknowledgement of difference womens experience and perspectives should be noticed and heard along with dominant male experience and perspectives. Feminists complain bitterly that that the dominant perspectives are exclusive of women because they are ideological and hence false, since they are interested and distorted. Feminists are not content with their inclusion in or numerical addition to universal humanity as read in liberal or Marxist theories. Whereas postmodernism stops at the recognition of difference, feminism posits difference as a challenge, a paradigm of its critical dialogue with its situation, past, present and future.The concept woman is thrown into serious doubt because the notion of gender itself is slowly moulding due to its exclusiveness. What is being advocated instead of gender is a multiplicity of identities for instance, if one widens ones horizon, one cannot fail to realise that differe nces of ethnic origin and class, sexual orientation (gays and lesbians), should be priority items on the liberation agenda. In spite of its usefulness in certain emancipatory projects, woman as a gender category stands to question now because it has dawned on contemporary gender thinkers that woman is essentially embedded in misogynist literature and that it is conducive to, and promotes, exclusionary practices.In short, a feminist survey of western languages shows that the meaning of some words, such as power, woman, human, reason, depicts gender bias against women the words are not universal. The concept-lingual sources of western rightist discourses, like feminism, are liberalism or Marxism in their vicious attack of their respective archrivals, authoritarianism, and capitalism. Ironically, Karl Marx did not forthwith address the specific situation of women. He presumed that his communism would provide liberation for women just as it would for all the exploited masses and under privileged minorities, male and female.131 Nordic Journal of African StudiesFriedrich Engels (Marxs lifetime friend, economic guardian, co-author, and Marxs editor) also narrowly attributed women subjugation to property relationships of the conjugal family only in capitalist societies he remained mute on the reality of their enslavement in non-capitalist societies including communism and matriarchal societies. Marxism and capitalism cannot be plausible concept-lingual sources for the gender movement in the new millennium since both of them are ideologies of conflict they pit man against man the state exploits the proletariat-worker in the former, whereas the capitalist boss exploits the labourer in the latter.The importance of authentic concepts of gender needs to be stressed. More importantly, the crucial concept of power needs to be unambiguously stipulated in contemporary gender thought and practice.The feminism of the 1970s and mid-eighties powerful proclaimed that the concep ts that are presented to us as universal and trans-historically valid actually realise male biases. For example, normative concepts such as reason, science and knowledge fail to devote the gender universalisation test, so to say. Even if these normative concepts embody ideals and express values, they nonetheless prescribe and evaluate behaviour in male-perspectives and so the values they express and ideals they embody are far from universal.Normative concepts function as descriptions of the endorsements of a specific society, and are faithful to past usage. Hence the complaint that feminism has taken the experience, i.e. marginalisation, of washrag middle class women to be representative of all women. The glaring weakness of these normative concepts is that they leave little or no room for disagreement or difference within a situation like a community. Conformity is the order of the day since they are treated as truth-conditions, instead of being emendations of electric current thought and action. These contemporary feminists fear that these values and ideals are codifications of norms regulating masculinity, where the womans normal is locus of the domesticity of the family, i.e. the private sphere of life. What current gender thought needs is the evolution of ongoing social practice. It should engage in evaluation of these concepts and influence the evolution of social practice in regard to concept-usage.3. GENDER AND FEMINISM THE AFRICAN SCENARIOThe dividing line that African women cannot identify with doctrinaire western feminism comes with cogent force because the knowledge and experience of African women have been ignored or marginalised by a feminism that reflects only the perspectives of white western middle-class women that it indulges in false universalism and lacks critical awareness of its situation are simple inferences drawn from the argument. Its conception of woman remains problematic and therefore vacuous because its woman is intended to d eny self-evident differences between woman and woman in situation and experience,132 Where is the Foundation of African Gender?privilege and power. It is apologetic of the peculiarities of woman since it misconceives them as functional and not as formal differences (from man).As a result, its content and purpose are not based on actual commonalties between women but on the experience and interests of some women who have the position and ability to impose upon other women their own idiosyncrasies, price and definitions, i.e. what they mean for themselves and others. For instance, when western feminism seeks to balance or reverse the social scales, it employs conceptual polarities such as nature-culture, strong-weak, reason-intuition, public-private, male-female-neuter sexual division of labour. To explain the position of women, it says women are closer to nature they are more intuitive they are more private or secretive, etc, not knowing that it simply endorses masculinist (and henc e exploitable) viewpoints about woman. then feminism lacks a critical awareness of its situation. Feminism is not in dialogue with its context, past and present, and therefore cannot be used to forge emendations to any society, which cries for variation of social relations. Feminism is engaged in a monologue, which mistakes its own ventriloquism for effectiveness since it is falsely generalising and insufficiently attentive to historical and cultural diversity.Another unwished-for feature of western feminism is that, although it borrows critical tools from other emancipatory theories like Reformation, liberalism and Marxism, it does not put itself forward to challenging other forms of subordination like slavery, colonialism, racism, and their accompanying prejudices and complexes, which run into women as well. Its exclusiveness to the western middle-class womans experience undermines its universality and objectivity, and therefore puts to serious doubt its relevance to the Africa n woman of the same era.35 Worse still, its serenity could easily be interpreted as its assent to slavery, colonialism and racism, experiences that western middle-class men caused on both African women and men.Though not unique, the situation of the African feminist and that of the Western feminist would not replicate. An African woman generally finds herself in a social setting where power might not be the paradigm of interpersonal life. Jobs are just as hard to get for a female as they are for her male counterpart. In a married situation, for example, she may dispense with the battle of balancing it out with her allegedly dominant male partner in terms of sexual division of labour, involving child-care and domestic chores due to the scenario of dependency, a creation of the extended family. Dependants fill in as auxiliary or surrogate mothers or fathers and as unofficial maids or cooks, etc. Even if dependants were not around, hiring domestic staff would be more affordable in her society than it would be in the west. As is well known, in the west, it is almost impracticable to hire domestic staff.3.1 TRADITION VERSUS MODERNITY SOCIO-POLITICS INCONTEMPORARY AFRICATransformation is a rare occurrence in Africa. Perhaps devolution, rather than evolution or revolution, is the modus operandi for social transformation in Africa. The interface of the past and the present may not be conducive to the development of radical gender even among urban or elite women. Past attitudes and values tend to phase out far too slowly under the weight of new attitudes and values. The usual conceptualisation of woman both among the rural and urban folk might have more conservative undertones than radical gender theorists wish. In Malawi, for instance, even after the lawful repeal of the indecent dress code, the woman in trousers or mini-skirt risks categorisation as a champion or promoter of moral turpitude. The continuing scenario of uncovering off mini-skirted city women by ven dors is testimonial enough of these slow-dying conservative undertones even in the urban or modernised areas of Malawi. Radical gender might be undaunted by this current negative public reception of trousers and mini-skirts in Malawi, dismissing it as a primary reaction of a bunch of male savages. while alone will heal this negative attitude gender activists console themselves. At this stage though, these attitudes should be of great concern because it is not unusual for radical gender women lobbyists to experience opposition and disapproval from fellow women.Another reality that might prevent replication of western gender in Africa is the social history of Africa. It is difficult to identify the dominant ideology for African societies outside Africas recent experience of slave trade, colonialism, and nationalism. However, anthropology and archaeology, which pretend to dig deeper into Africas past, and re-construct the Antique Africa antedating the three recent experiences of Afric a, reveal to us that there are matrilineal and patrilineal societies in Africa. In the patrilineal societies, for example, Ngoni, Tumbuka, Sena, Ngonde in Malawi, males are dominant. However, broadly speaking, in matrilineal societies women are more powerful than men, an issue that is accentuated by the husbands settling in their wives villages upon marriage. One would expect that in a setting where land is the most valuable property, due to belief on agriculture, a landowner would command a lot of power and influence. Husbands, as co-opted landowners, will in principle and practice have less power and influence than their wives. Therefore, if the western genders power paradigm is anything to go by, the matrilineal society depicts a reversal of the western gender model. In Malawi, Chewa, Yao, Manganja and Lomwe societies are largely matrilineal in principle. The Tonga of the northern shore of Lake Malawi can be included in gender-wise peculiar ethnic groups although the Tonga are bi-lineal.In these ethnic groups, one must distinguish the formal from informal power structures and modes of social organisation in the formal power setting, that is the traditional chieftaincy, chiefs hold only symbolic power since what they execute in public is largely the consensus, or the communis sensus, of the ruling134 Where is the Foundation of African Gender?Unlike feminist scholarship in the West, feminist theory and scholarship in Africa have formed neither a neatlydelineated field, nor one firmly rooted in theoretically-inflected politics. With the consolidation of Westernfeminisms between 1960 and the early 1980s and the growth of the so-called second wave, clear political andintellectual traditions were formed around radical, liberal and Marxist/socialist feminisms. Subsequent feminismsdrew on or deviated from these positions to engage increasingly with theories and politics emerging in thenineties. African theories and womens movements have taken very different paths .In certain ways, African theories and womens movements have been nearly linked to politics, although thispolitic