Africa After Gender?

10. Gender After Africa!

10 Gender After Africa! Eileen Boris I want to turn the question “What impact has gender as a category of analysis had on the study of Africa?” upside down, so to speak, and ask, if somewhat®ippantly, “What can Africa do for gender?” I make this move not to replicate the colonialist expropriation of African peoples and land, long a characteristic of Western investigation that found objects/subjects of research in the subcontinent and forced its intellectual framework on them. Rather, I enter this conversation in debt to Africans and others whose labors challenge essentialist conceptions of gender that have enmeshed women’s studies in the very binary oppositions that research on women, gender, and sexualities had sought to escape . Informing my analysis is the proposition that those from other ¤elds who seek to develop women’s studies as a site of knowledge production have much to learn from the work of Africanists. Feminist theory has consisted of writings by Westerners attached to an intellectual tradition that, until recently, misunderstood its own concrete, historically constructed gender systems as universal. By the early 1980s, an initial challenge to this feminist epistemology had come from within by women— especially black women, lesbian women, and black lesbian women—whose identities always appeared with a modi¤er that branded them as “other” to the white, middle-class, heterosexual standpoint that remained unarticulated. A second critique developed from those labeled “Third World women,” who not only saw the reigning knowledge systems as partial but strenuously protested their own objecti¤cation as victims of backward gender relations and sexual oppression in need of saving by Western feminists. Intersectionality and transnationalism became the new catchwords of gender analysis in response to these critiques (Mohanty 2003). But theory remained abstract,subject to timelessness and prone to essentialism. To combat ethnocentrism, I argue, we need to view gender as a product of location, negotiated by women and men with discursive and performative vocabularies that they deploy but do not command into existence . In short, we need to take the historicity of gender seriously. That Western knowledge was and continues to exist as a construction becomes apparent when we turn to formulations derived from distinct contexts that present alternative meanings of and ways of doing gender. Here Africa with a continent’s worth of multiple indigenous, colonial, and national pasts enters my analysis. Such diversity complicates any tendency to®atten gender analysis to a single presentation, illuminating even while ques- tioning gender as we in women’s studies have come to de¤ne the term. In this chapter, I re®ect on three crucial interventions African scholarship brings to the reconsideration of gender as a category of analysis: an unsettling of the relationship between the biological and social that reinforces trends within feminist thought; a questioning of the privileging of gender over other social attributes, especially age, lineage, kinship, and wealth, thus complicating understandings of “intersectionality”; and a revealing of gender as an expression of power through historical struggles over colonization and liberation. The following discussion makes no claims to comprehensiveness but rather draws upon a selective reading of Africanist scholarship to rethink the engagement of women’s studies with gender.1 The Biological and the Social Social constructionist to its core, much of contemporary Western feminist thought refutes Freud’s dictum that biology is destiny. By the early 1980s, “gender” as a category of analysis had come to distinguish the biological, which initially referred to male and female, from the cultural, which was associated with masculine and feminine. As Joan Scott (1988, 2) explained, “Gender is the social organization of sexual difference. But this does not mean that gender re-®ects or implements ¤xed and natural physical differences between women and men; rather gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences .” Nonetheless, as Linda Nicholson (1994, 82–83) points out, Scott and most social constructionists remain tied to a “biological foundationalism” that not only privileges the body but assumes “that distinctions of nature, at some basic level, manifest themselves in or ground sex identity, a cross-culturally common set of criteria for distinguishing women and men.” Nicholson more fruitfully argues that “we cannot look to the body to ground cross-cultural claims about the male/female distinction” nor can we forget that the body and how people think about it constitute in themselves historical and culturally constituted variables . Her insight that bodies, whether consisting of two sexes or re®ecting multiple genders, generate identities but only in...