28/04/21 at 18:00 (GMT)
Title: "Quietly Opting Out: Widows & Other Troublemakers in Rural Guinea- Bissau"
Keywords: Guinea Bissau, Widowhood
In this talk Dr. Joanna Davidson will explore how gender categories are meaningfully troubled in unexpected ways when women operate outside of normative conjugal pathways. Focusing on the increasing presence of widows' houses across Jola villages in Guinea-Bissau, she asks why the inhabitants of these houses are neither named nor recognized as a social category. Joanna Davidson suggests that widows pose such a problem to the patriarchal status quo of Jola society as to prohibit their very mention. By opting out of marital conformity, the presence of Jola widows haunts the institution of marriage because it provokes the dangerous suggestion that women might very well manage a life outside of it.
JOANNA DAVIDSON
Dr. Joanna Davidson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and an Associate Director of the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. Likewise, she is also an affiliated faculty member in the African Studies Center and in the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, as well as in the Global Development Policy Center at her university.
Davidson has had vast experience as a consultant, and has published and conducted long-term ethnographic research on Guinea-Bissau focused on gender and development issues. Her main areas of interest are socio-cultural anthropology, agrarian and rural societies in West Africa, environmental and economic change, ethnographic writing and storytelling, as well as the transformations of marriage and gender relations.
Project General Description:
Sexual and reproductive rights were inscribed explicitly in human rights instruments during the 1990's. While initially, especially during the 1970's, they were promoted in the framework of health under the banner of reproductive rights, these have widened considerably.Interventions have been designed from the macro-political level to the grassroots level. Nevertheless, the juridical and political nature of these instruments of international law, translated locally, creates forms of biopolitics that aren’t always aligned with local practices, thus promoting some resistances. A critical approach to this intersection is necessary, and the adequacy of transnational human rights language to sociocultural specificities should be questioned (Merry, 2012), because as Didier Fassin points out moral sentiments have become a driving force in contemporary politics (Fassin, 2012). This project analyses this in two west African countries, Guinea Bissau and Senegal. By looking in a critical perspective into the local activisms and the changing sociocultural practices, in relation with their social histories, we consider a field where local and international actors both develop discourses. We pay particular attention to public discussions around dividing issues such as gender equality, sexual rights, gender based violence, abortion, planned reproduction, gender roles, but also to legislation and its enforcement, or the financing of local agents in the field of international human rights. For these SEXRWA Webinars we invited scholars developing research on subjects we consider to have important correlations with our main objectives. With them we would like to widen the scope of the discussions on sexual and reproductive rights in Guinea Bissau and Senegal, to take into account local social dynamics.
https://sexrwa.cei.iscte-iul.pt/This project is hosted at CEI-Iscte, and is financed by FCT (PTDC/SOC-ANT/31675/2017)
