Critical reflections on #MeToo in contemporary South Africa through an African feminist lens

Shefer, Tamara; Hussen, Tigist Shewarega

doi:10.4324/9780367809263-31

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“…And her chapter indeed does a wonderful job of exploring the limitations of #MeToo and elaborating how these two movements contribute differently. I do however remain troubled by the centring of the #MeToo movement in thinking local activisms in the book (see Hussen, 2022;Hussen and Shefer, in press;Shefer and Hussen, 2020). In my own situatedness in South Africa as a feminist scholar, women's activism on the streets and online against sexual violence, decolonial feminist and queer voices, feminist killjoy protests and agencies, arguably appear far more powerfully in the South African imaginary, perhaps the global imaginary too, within this and other global Southern contexts of challenging the entangled histories and presents of Eurowestern colonial patriarchy.…”

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confidence: 99%

Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa

Shefer

2022

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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This fresh-off-the-press volume, Intimacy and Injury, is not only an attempt to think with and through #MeToo in the geopolitical contexts of India and South Africa; it also serves as a vital and energetic exchange of ideas between feminist activisms in these two global Southern spaces. It is also of course a dialogue between feminist activism and feminist scholarship. Perhaps even further it may be seen as part of a larger conversation about what scholarship is or should be, and questions about where activism begins and scholarship ends. The argument for activism as feminist knowledge is part of a larger critique of the neoliberal capitalist, colonial and patriarchal logic that still dominates in the university. The call for collaborative work across disciplines, modalities and other spaces of knowledge unrecognised by the academy is clearly a priority for decolonial, feminist and queer scholarship. The book models this admirably, it is threaded through with art, images and poetry, both in the chapters and in the reflective pieces that so poignantly draw the sections together. This is indeed a strength of this book which also presents us with a rich account of #MeToo and other feminist activisms within these two global Southern contexts, offering an important contribution to the larger scholarship around #MeToo and extending the lens of the recent international handbook (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir, 2021) which, while providing a valuable and wide scan of geopolitical contexts, included a minority of global Southern voices.This book starts off, appropriately, in a place of discomfort, acknowledging the widespread critiques of #MeToo as a global feminist movement. The introductory chapter reiterates the multi-layered contestations and debates as well as the divisions between feminists and polarisation of genders that have been ignited by the taking up or not taking up off #MeToo, particularly from the vantage point of global southern feminists. For example, the editors succinctly point out the ways in which the movement has been globally northern, white dominated and caution that Simplistic over-emphasis on #MeToo as a transformational moment of global feminist solidarity threatens to violently obscure the work and histories of feminist organising in our parts of the world; this is a trend we want to redress, by considering the manifestations of #MeToo in these contexts as well as its silences, weaknesses and incapacity to encompass the scale of longstanding local feminist work. (Roy, Falkoff and Phadke, p. 3)

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confidence: 99%