Thursday, October 26th
10:30 pm - 12:00 pm
Minor 110

Rudo Mudiwa, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine

Abstract: 
A Revolutionary Opening: 1975, New Women, and African Decolonization
African anti-colonial movements often invoked a New Woman—free, educated, and politically conscious—who would emerge from the rubble of colonialism. This talk examines how this figure emerges in the midst of several historical currents: the rise of Third World feminism, the Marxist-Leninist turn of African anti-colonial struggles, and consumer culture which marketed a transnational aesthetic befitting the New African Woman. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, I explore the New African Woman’s circulation in Pan-African media, party propaganda, and fiction. I argue that while it offered liberatory possibilities for women, New African Womanhood crafted a normative femininity—transnational yet paradoxically bound to nationalisms, subversive of gender norms yet bound to masculine figures—which compromised the revolutionary transformation promised by decolonization movements.