Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

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Browsing by Subject "Africa"

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    Food shaming and race, and hungry translations
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023) Lewis, Desiree
    Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America by Psyche A. Williams-Forson (2022) and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability by Richa Nagar (2019) deal with food and hunger in relation to the very different geo-political regions of North America and India. At the same time, they enter into dialogue with each other in exploring how socially situated bodies � othered in gendered, raced and neoliberal systems and discourses � navigate and resist oppressive food politics. As both authors also show, critical approaches to food politics should entail much more than attention to who gets to eat well, or why certain groups are able to waste food obscenely while most of the world�s population starves, cannot make informed and healthy food choices, or inhabits food deserts, those foodscapes of near-starvation created by the corporate food industry�s hunger for profits. As the authors show, exploring the politics of food, eating and hunger should focus also on the languages and attitudes surrounding how these are connected to radical struggles for human freedom. By focusing on the represented and imagined connections between human desires and experiences on one hand and food and hunger on the other, Williams-Forson and Nagar also encourage us to interrogate and re-imagine our relationships to both humans as well as nature and other living beings. These books� perspectives from different continents invite us to consider the trans-continental context of multiple subaltern struggles through the lens of food.
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    Matters of age: An introduction to ageing, intergenerationality and gender in Africa
    (Taylor & Francis and UNISA, 2012) Reddy, Vasu; Sanger, Nadia
    This introductory essay to this special issue of Agenda draws together a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary literature on ageing, intergenerationality and gender, and locates the significance of writing from Africa within this context. The first half of the essay provides a critical and comprehensive review of available literature in the field, highlighting the significance of research and writing on the ways in which gender mediates ageing and intergenerationality as both process and emotional space. The latter half of the essay engages the significance of the depth of contributions in this issue as critical in the conversation around ageing, gender, and intergenerationality in the context of Africa and the South, and the need for perspectives from multiple disciplines to continue engaging the field through both scholarship and advocacy.
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    Men in Africa: masculinities, materiality and meaning
    (Elliot & Fitzpatrick Inc., 2010) Shefer, Tamara; Stevens, Garth; Clowes, Lindsay
    At a public lecture in Cape Town earlier this year, Professor Sandra Harding, an internationally renowned feminist author, spoke to the question �Can men be subjects of feminist thought?� (1 March 2010, District Six Museum, Cape Town). In her talk, Harding called on men to elaborate critically on their subjective experiences and practices of being boys and men � from childhood to adulthood, and through fatherhood to old age. She argued that while androcentric thinking has dominated knowledge production globally, men�s self-reflexive voices on their own experiences of being boys and men have been relatively silent, particularly through a profeminist and critical gender lens. Harding thus drew attention to an important challenge confronting contemporary psychology, a challenge that underpins the rationale for this Special Edition of the Journal of Psychology in Africa. However, much of our knowledge within the discipline of psychology has been and remains uncritically based on boys� and men�s experiences and perspectives. More specifically, as Boonzaier and Shefer (2007) argue, most psychological knowledge is not only predominantly based on research with men, but also in most cases, middle-class, white, American men. Studies that problematise and foreground masculinity itself, that challenge masculinity as normative, and that apply a critical, gendered lens, are still relatively marginal in the social sciences and particularly in psychology. This is however beginning to change.