Culture, rights, and African women's futures

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to provoke conversations about rights and culture that enable us to employ an intersectional lens and approach to situating women's empowerment and rights issues within historical and international political economy concerns. Within a postcolonial African feminist theoretical and methodological framework, the chapter seeks discussions on the following questions: how does reference to culture irredeemably reduce women's rights issues to a realm of colonial discursive framing that makes it difficult to imagine a transformative approach to women's issues? How might an indigenous African world-sense (Oyewumi, The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) enable us grasp the intricacies and dialectics of relational thoughts on women? I propose that it is important to strategically eliminate the tendency to reify culture in discussions of rights since that often forecloses conversations and leads to reductionisms. Subsequently, employing a sociological imagination, the chapter examines how we can engage with the social structures that shape the cultures of societies and through which we can properly engage in a process of mapping embedded, generated, and recurring inequalities and hierarchies. The chapter concludes by suggesting that we need to connect rights issues to political, religious, environmental, global neoliberal, and technological changes, among others.