Radical African Feminist Patricia McFadden, on Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice

Photograph of Professor Dr. Patricia McFadden is from here.
It is a still image from this interview in Swaziland

An excerpt from work linked to later in the post:

Our starting point has to be a recognition of the need to reassert feminist agency as the most effective response to sexual violation, abuse, femicide, and all naturalised patriarchal and heterosexist patterns of behaviour that intensify the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS. Challenges to the resulting social, physiological and sexual crises must be based on our reclaiming a vibrant feminist discourse and practice.

—Dr. Patricia McFadden

I am proud and honored to make space on my puny little blog to promote the brilliant life and work of Professor Dr. Patricia McFadden. Across the globe most women who are doing great feminist work are not recognised by the West/Global North/"First" World's media—at all.

Most women—feminist, womanist, or neither—are not rich, are not white, and do not speak English as a first or second language. Most women are not professional academics or people who earn a humane income. Most are living lives at the precarious and practical intersections of gender, race, class, region, age, ability, and sexuality. Most women are socially positioned to care for other people, whether members of their families of origin, or their own children. One of the political definitional features of "being woman" is that you "take care of other people, intimately". This is not a definition of what it means to be "a man". Needless to say. To "be a man" is to exploit other people (read: women) for your own personal gain and satisfaction.

The stigmas against poor Black women's sexuality and sex anywhere in the world seem to know no bounds in the psyches and institutional practices of white men who are increasingly globalising the impoverishment, exploitation, rape, and gynocide of Latina, Indigenous, Asian, Brown, and Black women.

This means that women of color cannot be seen, really, as human beings, let alone as humane beings. Because their work is assumed to exist for others, or they are assumed to exist-only-in-order-to-disappear.

Biographical information about her life and work, from esquela de feminismo.org. (In English, Open School Feminism.)

Patricia revels in introducing herself as a Radical African Feminist who does not compromise on women’s inalienable rights—anywhere women live and struggle for dignity and integrity. Born in Swaziland over a half century ago Patricia lives and works in Zimbabwe and is based at the Southern African Political Economy Trust. Her work in the women’s movement is national and regional in addition to global work in the women’s movement on issues of Violation and Sexuality.

Patricia is a well respected feminist activist and scholar, she is presently gathering her many articles written over the past 3 decades on a number of issues impacting women’s lives and hope to publish them as a collected volume with South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts later in 2005. Her most recent work/writing /activism is focused on issues of citizenship and women’s engagements with the state on issues of entitlement and security.

Born in Swaziland in 1952, Patricia McFadden received her first degree from the University of Botswana and Swaziland in politics and administration, with economics and sociology as minors; she received a master’s degree in Sociology from Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania; and a doctorate from Warwick University in the United Kingdom (1987). McFadden has taught in many African countries. She has also taught in the United States at Cornell, Spelman, Syracuse, and Smith University, and in Europe. She served as international dean in the International Women’s University (IFU) from 1998 – 2000 in Hannover.

McFadden has worked in the African and global women’s movements for the past 30 years, writing, conceptualizing, teaching, training, advocating and publishing as editor of the Southern African Feminist Review from 1995 – 2000, and as a program officer in the Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) in Harare, Zimbabwe, from 1993 – 2005. She also taught in the Masters in Social Policy (MPS) program offered by SARIPS for the past seven years, and was an adjunct professor on the Syracuse Study Abroad program from 1994 – 2000.

McFadden’s main areas of intellectual inquiry are: sexuality, reproductive and sexual health and rights (especially for young women), and identity, violation and citizenship for African women. She has presented numerous papers at universities, conferences and seminars internationally in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Namibia, South Africa, Ghana, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Brazil, China, Germany Ethiopia, the United Kingdom and others.

More recently she has been working as a ‘feminist consultant,’ supporting women in creating institutionally sustainable feminist spaces within Southern Africa. The most recent initiative is the establishment of a women’s leadership center in Windhoek, Namibia. McFadden says that her priority is to provide conceptual, intellectual and programmatic support to African feminists in envisioning and supporting programs that draw on the radical political energies of African women as writers and as citizens across the continent.

McFadden has taught a course on “African Feminisms in a Globalizing World.”
 

What follows next, with another excerpt and link to the piece in full, is to me, a tremendously important piece of writing. I thank Patricia McFadden for writing it and for all the work she is doing to improve the condition and quality of women's lives.

The excerpt is from Feminist Africa, a journal dedicated to "cutting edge, informative, and provocative African scholarship attuned to feminist agendas" (URL: http://www.agi.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/429/feminist_africa_journals/archive/02/fa_2_standpoint_1.pdf)

Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice by Patricia McFadden

This is the place that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has brought many of us to: the edge of the precipice of life. "Living on the edge" in terms of sexual and physical violation, unacceptably large numbers of black women all over the world face the constant threat of infection with the HI virus by males known and unknown. This terrifying existence is exacerbated by the seemingly endless spiral into poverty and deprivation for millions of women around the globe. And there is no doubt that the public debates, campaigns and health care responses generated by this deepening crisis have been underwritten by a long legacy of patriarchal and heterosexist policing of women's freedoms and rights.

Again, I thank her.