Feminist backlash and a postcolonial dialectics: Rethinking binaries
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Abstract
Inspired in part by a feminism-related debate on the WhatsApp ‘Collaborative Research’ Forum to which I belong, this paper argues that feminism remains an alien consciousness in Africa, and that the trumped up marginalisation of the female was a colonial subterfuge to legitimise homogenous privileges. The analysis therefore envisages two things: first, that a backlash against the theory results from a combination of epistemic inconsistencies that evolved from a malleable discourse and the sustained indolence with which feminism was received in the continent, facilitating the erasure of every enabling data; and second, prospects into the possibility of an alternative theoretical imaginary that will realign gender relations back into an organic, non-intellectual and non-materialist context in which nomenclatures renegotiate an inclusive worldview with only relative polarisation of status. Textual and ethnographical material will be used to animate the analysis within the context of glocalisation imperatives.
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