Theorising Gender, Class, and Mobility in Africa: Hegemony, Critiques, and Feminist Interventions.

Presentation by: Dorothy Takyiakwaa

Authored by: Faisal Garba and Dorothy Takyiakwaa

Abstract

Dominant migration scholarship has framed African mobility as an empirical anomaly to be explained through theories developed elsewhere, rather than as a starting point for theorising migration itself. This article argues that feminist development frameworks, including Women in Development, Women and Development, and Gender and Development, reproduce the same error: each is sedentarist, treating stability as the normative condition of women’s lives and mobility as a deviation, disruption or exception. More so, historical accounts subsume women’s mobility within that of men, even though women have been central to long-distance mobility on the African continent and beyond. The feature article draws on the Guyanese historian and activist, Walter Rodney’s critique of colonial political economy, on African feminist theorisations of gender, class, consciousness, and on the Tanzanian legal scholar Issa Shivji’s concept of working people as a corrective to class-blind development feminism. The article proposes a decolonial approach that asks not why Africans move, but why their movement has been made to require explanation at all.