Multiple targets, mixing strategies: Complicating feminist analysis of contemporary South African women's movements
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2005
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Feminist Africa
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University of Cape Town
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In this brief commentary, I want to focus on the importance of identifying the key aspects of identity that motivate women to participate in activism for social change. In doing so, I build on the injunction, variously expressed by Basu (1995), Mohanty (1991) and Mouffe (1992), that women's identities are multiply informed by their racial, ethnic, socio-economic and geographic locations. Consequently, the issues that impel them into action for gender justice, as well as the alliances they choose, will necessarily be informed by these different aspects of their identities. However, the issues that they take up are not of their own choosing. These too are informed by the confluence of geopolitical relations in the historical moment. Multiple shifts have occurred in women's struggles in South Africa, and they have had to invent equally multiple and innovative strategies and spaces of engagement, as well as enter into new alliances with other gendered movements to effect gender justice.
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Reference:
Salo, E. (2005). Multiple targets, mixing strategies: Complicating feminist analysis of contemporary South African women's movements. Feminist Africa, (4).