Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

Cultural Practice as Gendered Exclusion:
Experiences from Southern Africa
PATRICIA McFADDEN
Summary:
I will attempt a definition of culture as gendered practice which excludes
women from sites and statuses related to power ( in both social and
material senses), as it interacts with notions of citizenship, nation and
development. I will speak to culture as a ‘re-invented’ and heavily contested
phenomenon and terrain, especially in relation to issues of identity,
belonging and authenticity in the context of Africa ( as a broad geopolitical
and historical space) and in particular reference to the struggles
of African women for rights and new statuses in Southern Africa as it
becomes ‘post-colonial’.
I want to begin this brief intervention by locating my use of the notion of
culture in a resistance discourse that reflects a development of the meaning
and uses of culture beyond its traditional definition as an expression
of past human creativity and interaction, “…all those practices, like the arts of
description, communication and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic,
social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose
principal aims is pleasure” (Said, 1994).
That is only one multi-faceted side of culture as a phenomenon. However,
as Said goes on to say, culture is “a source of identity, and a rather combative
one at that, as we see in recent ‘returns’ to culture and tradition… In this second
sense culture is a sort of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage
one another” (ibid.).
Drawing particularly from the work of both Amina Mama (1997),
Kum Kum Bhavnani (1993) and the work edited by Filomena Steady
(1981), among an array of feminist scholars who have engaged with notions
of culture in relation to the struggles by women of color for inclusion
into the conceptual and territorial spaces of Africa and Europe respec-