Feminist digital citizenship in Africa

Bosch, Tanja; Roberts, Tony

Feminist digital citizenship in Africa

Book

2025-12-30

Publisher

Zed Books

Department

Centre for Film and Media Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Abstract

Feminist Digital Citizenship in Africa: Agency, Rights and Resistance, edited by Tanja Bosch and Tony Roberts (Zed Books, Bloomsbury, 2025), is the first edited volume authored entirely by African feminist scholars to document the continent's emerging wave of digital citizenship. The book theorises feminist digital citizenship as the use of mobile and internet technologies, particularly social media, to participate in civic and political life in ways that advance gender rights, bodily autonomy, and sexual freedoms long suppressed within mainstream public spheres. Ten country-specific case studies spanning Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa, including Nigeria, Zambia, South Africa, Guinea, Egypt, Mozambique, Malawi, Sudan, and Ethiopia, examine episodes of feminist contention in which digital tools are mobilised to circumvent patriarchal editorial control in legacy media and political institutions, generating counter-publics where marginalised voices articulate rights claims directly. The volume develops a "digital dialectic" framework that holds in tension the productive affordances of digital platforms, including the capacity to build safe spaces and sustain transnational solidarity, against their concurrent use by patriarchal actors to conduct surveillance, disinformation, and online gender-based violence. Chapters draw on intersectional analysis attentive to gender, race, sexuality, class, and coloniality, with sustained attention to LGBTQ+ struggles and transgender online solidarity practices. The introductory chapter situates the case studies within a critique of white Western digital feminism and articulates a conformist-reformist-transformist framework for differentiating modes of feminist digital action. Building on the editors' earlier volume Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression (2023), the collection contributes to digital media studies, African studies, gender and queer studies, and citizenship theory. The book is published open access under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) through Bloomsbury Open Collections.