Archive for April, 2010
How do we stop society killing women?
Posted on April 26, 2010, by Kudzai, under Gender Masala.
Kudzai Makombe
In sub-Saharan Africa, married women are at high risk of contracting HIV. Photo credit: Petr Kratochvil www.publicdomainpictures.net
A good friend sent me an interesting academic article last week that got me quite excited. Entitled ‘Shona Womanhood: Rethinking Social Identities in the Face of HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe’, the article really hit home on an issue that we all know is out there for most African women; the cultural definition of a “good woman” as a married woman with children, and the impact this has at a time when the highest HIV infection rates are among married women, for well known reasons related to definitions of masculinity in our cultural contexts.
The author, Pascah Mugwini, writing in The Journal of Pan African Studies (vol.2 no.4, June 2008), points out that Shona women outside marriage are much safer from infection than those within because “there are no constricting cultural norms barring her from negotiating safer sex once she decides to have it”. He also points out that there is more stigma now in having been widowed as a result of HIV than there is in being a single woman.
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Las terroristas suicidas
Posted on April 13, 2010, by Kudzai, under estereotipo, human rights, media, mujeres, politics, stereotypes, violación sexual, violence, violencia, war rape.
Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO.- Cada vez que aparecen noticias sobre mujeres que se inmolan en sangrientos ataques terroristas, se me despierta la misma mezcla de sorpresa y horror. (more…)
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Clitoraid confusing genuine well-wishers
Posted on April 12, 2010, by Kudzai, under Gender Masala.
Kudzai Makombe
I can’t bear to read anything about female genital mutilation. Of all the forms of gender-based violence, this one disturbs me more than any other and I struggle to understand why anyone, male or female, would subject a child or another adult to this form of torture.
Religion or culture, as far as I am concerned are not any kind of excuses and there can be no justification for this practice. My heart breaks when my children get hurt in any small way so I wonder at the power of patriarchy to make women, who have themselves experienced its horrors, act as the gatekeepers of this harmful practice and subject their own daughters to the same.
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The baby elephant in the room
Posted on April 8, 2010, by Kudzai, under children, women, men and more.
Guest blogger Trevor Davies
Are we missing something in the gender debate? Credit: Zuwa Davies
Simple things sometimes seem the most difficult to accept. We protest that the hardest place to tackle gender inequity is in the privacy of the home and then we spend little or no time in our work on women’s rights, feminism and masculinities examining the area where we interact most in the home - in the raising of our children.
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