Anyidoho, Nana Akua. Women, Gender and Development in Africa
2020, The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
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Abstract: Gender denotes the social prescriptions associated with biological sex in regard to roles, behaviour, appearance, cognition, emotions, and so on. Social relations of gender or gender relations encompass all relationships in which gender subjectivities play a role, including those among people, and between people and the institutions, systems, and processes of development. The chapter describes three features of gender relations that are generally consistent across societies – gender ideologies and myths; gendered division of labor; and unequal power relationships – and discusses their implications for development. The chapter further explains the centrality of gender to the development enterprise and discusses various approaches to integrating gender analysis in development processes.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power
2013, Journal of Developing Societies, 29(4), pp. 331–353.
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, Contributed by: Rens ColletAbstract: This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the post-1945 United Nations normative order, the Cold War epoch that ended in 1989, the current neoliberal dispensation as well as the post 9/11 anti-terrorism and securitization. While Africans have actively contested Euro–North American hegemony throughout these periods, they have not yet succeeded in breaking the strong global technologies of coloniality that continue to prevent the possibilities of African agency. This is why this article ends with a call for deepening the decolonization and deimperialization of the international order in the twenty-first century.
Comment: Useful for offering alternate perspective to Wallerstein's world system theory. Theorizes not about the detrimental effects of colonialism, put also offers a more constructivist approach to analyzing Africa's current position in the world system.
Comment: Overview of three features of gender relations: ideologies and myths, gendered division of labor, unequal power relationships. Explains why subjectivity and social and historical context matter in gender development and interventions with Africa as Global South example.