Mon | October 7, 2024 | 16:00 – 17:30 CEST
Since 2021, Dr. Serawit B. Debele is Leader of the Intersectionality Junior Research Group within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. She is the author of “Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual” (Brill, 2019). Currently, she is conducting research on religion and sexuality in Ethiopia. In her research, she combines historical and ethnographic approaches to trace the change and continuity of discourses on sexuality, and how the religious factor shapes those discourses. She is also a joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal of Secularism and Nonreligion. She also co-convenes the African Academy for Urban Diversity (AAUD), an academy overseen by the Socio-Cultural Diversity Department of MPI-MMG.
Ethnicity: the Predicament of Intersectional Feminism in Ethiopia?
In this talk, I reflect on thinking and doing intersectionality from/in Africa by specifically focusing on the entanglement of gender and ethnicity. Like elsewhere on the continent, researchers in Ethiopia deploy intersectionality to analyze socio-economic inequality of women and show how multiple factors like class, ethnicity, religion, urban-rural location shape their struggles. In feminist circles, the hegemony of ethnicity is a source of anxiety because it suffocates the political space and thereby disturbs women’s organizing for their universal rights. Many argue that ethnicity subordinates intersectional questions of gender and class by privileging identity politics that exploits the woman’s body to consolidate ethnic based federalism. This anxiety around ethnicity, I would argue, indicates two problems with traveling theories. First, little work is done to problematize intersectionality other than applying it. Second, the commitment to apply results in less attention to the specificities of what makes a woman an intersectional subject. In exploring some of these feminist discourses that suggest prioritizing one category over the other, I interrogate what it means to speak intersectionally (a phrase I borrow from Zethu Matebeni)
Venue:
University of Cologne, Institute of Geography
Südbau, Übungsraum 3
Otto-Fischer-Straße 4
50674 Cologne
