Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

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CULTURAL PRACTICE AS GENDERED EXCLUSION • McFADDEN
ital Mutilation, FGM, by presenting it as merely the ‘cutting of the genitals’
– for a typical example of this de-politicized re-naming see Masterson
and Hanson Swanson, 2000) – and all sorts of fascinating expressions
of sexual exotica.
Such academic practices not only perpetuate the ‘colonial gaze’ within
the North, but they reinforce the exclusionary practices used by Black
men who occupy the neo-colonial state and who have a vested interest in
keeping African women outside the most critical sites of power in those
societies. Who would have imagined that essentialist white feminists and
Black ‘womanist’ anthropologists would become intellectual and political
bed-fellows with myopic white male anthropologists and Black male nationalists
who occupy a neo-colonial state on that tragic continent I call
home. But that is what it looks like from where I am positioned as an
African feminist scholar engaged in the struggle for my rights and the
rights and dignity of my sisters.
I would like to move on and look at some of the exclusionary practices
used by men in the state and in the rural spaces of the continent to
maintain a ‘cultural authenticity’ through the denial of rights and entitlements,
especially in terms of bodily integrity and material property, to
African women. I will reply on examples drawn mainly from Zimbabwe,
South Africa.
Restricting Women’s Rights to Property and to Mobility
Through the re-invention of culture as the central trope of nationalist discourse,
and it’s deployment as the authentic expression of anti-colonial,
anti-racist ideology, African men were able to position women outside the
most critical social, political and economic institutions in both colonial
and neo-colonial societies (Barnes & Win; Prinsloo, 1999). The notion of
exclusionary practice is useful to an understanding of how this was done,
because culture is so easily constructed as untouchable and sacrosanct; as
something which must be guarded and protected, especially from external
influences and pollution; and by positioning women as the custodians
of these sacred cultural texts, women themselves become trapped in an
unchanging phenomenal reality which allows for their exclusion in structural,
ideological and other terms.
One of the earliest expressions of cultural exclusion as a gendered expression
of women’s ‘Outsiderness’ can be seen in the manner through
which African and white men colluded to keep African women outside the
emerging urban spaces of the colonial town and city (Barnes, 1992;