Search results

This chapter reviews developments in the intellectual and activist work of African feminists and gender scholars over the past two decades. African feminists and gender scholar activists have broken with dominant epistemologies to frame their own sites of knowledge production and feminist identity, reflecting shifting conditions in local and global contexts. The knowledge they generate is rooted in a tradition of scholarship, activism, and engagements with state institutions and with transnational and regional feminist movements. I discuss (1) contexts in which African feminist standpoints have emerged over the past 20 years, (2) developments in women and gender studies programs, and (3) ways in which African feminist scholars in the continent and diaspora have stimulated intellectual engagement and activism through feminist research and publishing, collaborative scholarship, influencing policy, and new forms of activism.

During the last three decades or so, the introduction of gender studies into higher education in Romania as a field of teaching and research has proved to be a very uneven and sometimes precarious process. The notion of gender has not been properly integrated into scholarly research, and women’s and gender studies have therefore been seen as an appendix to mainstream research in the humanities and the social sciences. This chapter aims at providing a meaningful picture of how gender studies have become part of the higher education system in Romania, what challenges have been met on the way and what future gender studies have in the education landscape. It also provides a comprehensive overview of the significance and importance of the TARGET project for the implementation of the first gender equality plan in the Romanian higher education system.

The article engages the “double identity” of being a feminist activist and academic in a tertiary institution in a post‐colonial society. The aim is to grapple with the personal experiences of a “change agent” in a tertiary education sector that is going through political transformation. The author also reflects on the impact of neo‐liberal capitalism on tertiary institutions, and its depoliticising effect on feminist activism. It engages the establishment of gender studies programs.

The article is a viewpoint and uses the personal reflections of a feminist scholar at a South African university to illustrate issues of personal location at a university as a site of struggle, but also location in the global South. It elaborates on the difficulty of changing male dominated institutional cultures and ways in which feminist activism is subverted.

The article shows how the experiences of being a change agent make “the personal political” and this contributes to taking a psychological toll. It exposes the intransigence toward change in hierarchical male dominated institutional cultures and recommends feminist solidarity across tertiary institutions, as well as using institutional opportunities for feminist purposes as counter measures to co‐option.

The value of the article is located in the reflection of a feminist scholar on her own experiences in the context of a South African university but may open a space for feminist scholars in tertiary institutions globally to relate to these experiences.

Starting in the 1960s, university systems around the world began to undergo a variety of drastic changes that would forever alter higher education. The spread of social movements were fueled by anti-war protests, demands for civil rights, and new forms of economic and political organization (Lipset, 1993). In terms of changes in universities, students demanded greater educational access and equal opportunities. A worldwide logic of inclusiveness increasingly affected national political and educational outcomes, including transformations in multiple dimensions of the status of women in the polity and in the educational system. This chapter focuses on the emergence and expansion of women's studies curricula in universities throughout the world, treating this unexpected development as a further manifestation of the globalization of a logic of inclusiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to direct attention to recent research on women's entrepreneurship, focusing on Nordic countries.

The paper encourages research that investigates how context, at the micro, meso and macro level, is related to women's entrepreneurship, and acknowledges that gender is socially constructed.

This paper finds evidence that recent calls for new directions in women's entrepreneurship research are being followed, specifically with regard to how gender is done and how context is related to women's entrepreneurial activities.

This paper assesses trends in research on women's entrepreneurship, mainly from the Nordic countries.

This study examines how cultural factors associated with women in plural families in the Southern parts of Nigeria affect the women’s entrepreneurial behaviours in their family businesses – higher education institutions (HEIs). There have been studies on women entrepreneurship, and the associated barriers, in family firms. However, the non-existence of studies on how cultural factors may affect women’s entrepreneurial behaviours in polygamous family firms poses a research gap. We seek to address this in this study, by using the term polygamous family firms in order to make a clear distinction from the traditional family firms that saturate several European countries and eslewhere. This study aims to understand how culture affects women’s entrepreneurial behaviours in polygamous family firms. Specifically, it shows how family belief systems and shared cultural norms influence women’s entrepreneurial behaviours in these firms. In this vein, we employed the case study strategy and used interviews and observations in our data collection process. Although polygamy is considered repressive in some cultures, this study’s findings reveal that it is a natural practice in Nigeria and not a dying tradition. We contribute to the literature on family firms and female entrepreneurship by showing the cultural hindrances to women empowerment within the polygamous family firm context. We provide theoretical and practical implications as well as future research agenda to encourage more studies on women’s entrepreneurial behaviours in polygamous family firms.

Research on gender attitudes has consistently found that younger generations have more gender egalitarian views than older generations. Less attention, however, has been directed toward examining whether the generation gap has grown or shrunk over time and whether it differs across dimensions of gender attitudes. Using data from the General Social Survey for years 1977–2018,the authors examine the generational gap in gender attitudes across three components: views toward women in leadership, working mothers, and the gendered division of family labor between public and private spheres. The results show that differences between generations vary significantly across these dimensions. Attitudes have converged over time in support for women’s leadership, yet Baby Boomers espouse slightly higher levels of support than other generations, including the younger Generation Xers and Millennials. In contrast, consistent generation gaps are observed in support for working mothers, where younger generations hold more supportive views than respective older generations. Attitudes toward the gendered division of public/private sphere labor have converged between Millennials, Generation Xers, and Baby Boomers, with only Pre-Baby Boomers holding significantly more traditional views. Collectively, these trends highlight how cultural change through cohort replacement does not uniformly advance gender egalitarian ideologies. Instead, these shifts vary across specific dimensions of gender attitudes.

The purpose of the chapter is to overcome interpretative dualism on migrant and native women’s victimization by proposing a Bourdieusian approach to the continuities of symbolic violence within post-patriarchal regimes of women’s freedom.

This conceptual chapter examines the Bourdieusian approach to some empirical research and continues with questions for feminist thought. The author discusses sociological research in Italy and in European contexts, and highlights the many “gazes” which can reveal the illusio of universal gender rights and the neo-colonial discourse on migrant women.

Research finds that the participant objectivation attitude and concern for disturbing dissonances in the habitus and body hexis of “others” produces tools for revealing the misrecognition of domination. At the theoretical level, the chapter shows how the plurality of hegemonic discourses on symbolic violence endorses not only social forces reproducing neo-colonial stratifications of gender, sense of belonging and class positions, but also ambivalent experiences of domination and freedom for women.

The chapter aims to motivate the encounter between Bourdieu’s view of male domination and classical feminist constructs as lived body experience, sexual contract, and traffic in women.

The chapter provides an innovative analysis intersecting Bourdieu’s constructs and feminist thought in re-considering “gender-women” as a privileged locus for feminist discourse. Gender dualism under the lens of symbolic violence is viewed as both an appearance and a structural field within the dynamics of domination.

African feminist scholars and activists have made major contributions to our understanding of gender-based violence. This is especially the case in southern Africa, which has a long history of high rates of violence against women and girls. Their rates of gender-based violence are among the very highest in the world. While there are many forms of gender-based violence, this chapter will explore the important contributions of African gender scholars and activists to our knowledge concerning domestic violence and rape. These issues will be interrogated using Zimbabwe and South Africa as case studies, with some reference to Namibia. In the region, domestic violence and sexual assault have deeply rooted structural explanations linked to the long history of colonialism, apartheid and white minority rule, political transition, economic crises and adjustment, changes in expected gender roles and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In the past 25 years, Zimbabwe and South Africa attempted to address violence against women through the development of laws as well as the creation of non-governmental organizations. Although these important efforts have not resulted in a major decrease in violence against women, they clearly demonstrate the long history of African women’s actions in resisting state power and patriarchy. African women as citizens, scholars and activists are responsible for bringing to the fore the critical importance of reducing gender-based violence in order to establish strong, just and sustainable societies in southern Africa.