SA must transcend Big Man politics

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Star

Johannesburg - It was one of those student protests, the kind of protests at our universities that have become a norm again in this country.

I don’t remember the exact issue of contestation that day, because they are so many. We might have been protesting against the financial exclusion of hundreds of students; or it might have been a protest against the dehumanising treatment of our outsourced mothers and fathers. Or it could have been another protest where we sought to be reflected in a curriculum that is still centered on colonial thinking.

The Deafening Silence of the EFF's Women Leaders

Siphokazi Magadla, SACSIS

“All we are asking is that he pay back the money, why are we getting thrown out?” was the question that came from a parliamentary member of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who was identified in a Voice of America news report, as “Female EFF member” on 21 August, the day the EFF chanted “pay back the money”, to a humiliated and ill-looking Jacob Zuma. Right before Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF spokesperson started chanting, I hoped for a longer exchange between parliamentary speaker, Baleka Mbete, and the “Female EFF member”.

Everywhere is War

Danielle Bowler says that multiple identities have multiple, concomitant sites of oppression. Eyewitness News

There is a passage from Staceyann Chin’s essay Falling for Bob Marley that will always stay with me. It is indelibly marked on my consciousness, read at a time when I was a university student trying to understand the world and my place in it. That issue of place is fundamentally important, as contemplating your fit (or ill fit, more precisely) in a world designed for certain people will inevitably turn to questions of identity. This question is the through-line in Chin’s essay, as she contemplates the factors that led to her sitting a Brooklyn bar on a rainy, autumn day, instead of in the place of her birth. She writes:

“If I were heterosexual, I would still be in Kingston, eating jerk fish from Island Grill, and drinking a cold Red Stripe Light. But I am an out lesbian, so reality pounds icy on the windows of my New York City. Mixed green salad, chamomile tea, salmon and cream cheese on everything-bagel. I am in political exile. Self-imposed, necessary, difficult.”

All struggles are connected: The intersections of the political

by Camalita Naicker, Bokomoso

During the Rape Crisis Teach-in held by the Rhodes University Politics Department in Grahamstown this July, South African historian and researcher Dr Catherine Burns, brought up a little known event that happened in Soweto in February 1990.

Mary Mabaso had organised an anti-rape march to draw attention to the increase in rape after 1976. Young women were being abducted and raped by gangs of young men who were known as ‘jackrollers,’ and this soon became a ‘fashionable’ practice amongst some male youth.

Patricia Hill Collins: Intersecting Oppressions

Patricia Hill Collins: Intersecting Oppressions by TigersEye99

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

Click here to download this book in pdf.

This is the second in a series of posts offering readings in feminist theory. We hope that these posts will make some important feminist ideas more accessible to people who haven’t read much theory. 

- The Cardiff Feminist Network

I have decided to discuss Patricia Hill Collins’s chapter ‘Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination’ from her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, because it gives a very good explanation of intersectionality, a theory which I’m sure you’ve seen discussed on feminist blogs. ‘Intersectionality’ argues that we should focus on how different systems of oppression interlock. The chapter is quite long, dense and theoretical but I’ll try and pick out some points which have significant implications for feminism.