GENDER STUDIES IN GHANA: WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Paper Presented at a Public Lecture organized by CEGRAD on the 15th

September 2015 at FELT Auditorium, University of Cape Coast, Ghana

By

Prof. Agnes Atia ApusigahUniversity for Development Studies

TamaleINTRODUCTION

In a country where social development has remained largely an apology, inequalities across various divides, especially gender, have tended to mark the very fabric of society. Gender inequalities in educational, political, economic and health systems, among others, continue to draw analysis of various forms. Gender Studies (GS) has thus emerged in response to the need for data and evidence for the analysis and understanding of our socio-economic system, which has remained largely gendered. There is also the need to use such analysis as the basis for training, education and advocacy. For us as an emerging economy at the juncture of traditionalism and modernism, this becomes even more imperative. We need analyses, advocacy and training based on our own history and struggle. Thus, inspired by an activist initiative to gather evidence and provide knowledge for driving gender aware and responsive social change, GS has evolved as a mediatory tool and space. In the course of its evolution, GS has found a comfortable home in developmentalism where anti-poverty responses have compelled governments, donors and civil society to engage in gender discourse. Hence, although starting as activism, it has become developmentalist even as it is gradually being institutionalized especially within academia.

The activist origins of GS lies in the initial discursive works of cultural analysts, which took the form of the critiques, mostly by existentialists, on society and especially about men and women’s position in society and access to socio-economic opportunities such as education, politics and the economy. Such early works, including the women’s education proposals by J.S. Mills, Edward Burke and J. J. Rousseau, which served to domesticate women, sparked off counter proposals by their contemporary women existentialist philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell and Simone de Beauvior. In that evolving modernist age of an intellectually driven society where discursive analyses by avant garde philosophers steered the course of social discourse, it was such treatises, emerging from Europe and North America, which inspired reason and drove social change. The modernist agenda that was set up in the process paved way for a developmentalism which positioned gender in an instrumentalist trajectory. Thus, gender analysis, like Third World analysis, was foisted on the platform of harnessing women’s untapped potentials for socio-economic growth.

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In the age of developmentalism, GS gained grounds as a basis for gaining knowledge and skills for enhancing women’s contributions to, rather than, benefits of society. It was positioned as a process for promoting gender equality and women’s rights for socio-economic progress. This process can be said to coincide with our human development history; one that begun with the subjugation and thus dehumanization of the powerless resulting in the objectification of weak bodies to this later face-saving pacification effort to rehumanize and restore justice. Through mercantilism, slavery, colonialism and globalism, smaller and deprived nations and peoples have had to bear the burdens of the growth of the powerful. The paternalistic motivation of such discourse has also been heavily underpinned by a patriarchal agenda contrived to minimalize and marginalize women in perpetuity. Starting simply as a recognition of women’s discrimination, GS has gradually assumed some analytic complexity and gained disciplinary attention. The push for relational analysis in particular has served to shift meanings in the ways that we have understood and should understand gender issues. Also, having emerged from efforts to build capacities for informed programming and institutional responses to gender issues, it has steadily gained grounds while owning space in both the scholarly academy and development practice as a legitimate area of study. What has happened in the process, in that journey, is of general interest in this analysis. Of particular concern, however, is whether we know enough of that journey to be able to determine where we are now. Drawing from personal and programming experiences, historical documentation and scholarly works, I attempt to map out that journey by looking back at its origins in an effort to help re/construct a pathway of GS in Ghana in the search for insights that could inform our journey forward.

Consequently, the analysis has been sectioned into four parts. The first attempts an excavation of the terrain with the view to contextualize the emergence of GS not just as activist/practitioner initiative but also as a philosophical and intellectual exercise with implications for the academic/scholarly enterprise. This is followed by the examination of the various forms and manifestations of GS as discipline, research, practice, programming and discourse. Next is a focus on the Ghanaian context of GS in direct response to the question: where are we now? In that section, the discussion centres on discursive trends and their inherent benefits and challenges. The last and final section is futuristic and thus presents proposals for refashioning GS to respond to and with changing times.

FRAMING GENDER STUDIES

Understanding Gender Studies

Gender Studies (GS) has come to stay as a scholarly endeavour with varying implications for its users and patrons. Although starting as a philosophical exercise and evolving from an activist standpoint to

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gradually gain grounds in politics and development, it is increasingly gaining grounds as a disciplinary area of scholarly specialization in academia. Both its philosophical beginnings and activist struggles have strong implications for its current disciplinary status. The discursive streak that characterised that criticism and counter criticism served to give it its activist impetus. Thus, from its very beginnings, GS has been embroiled in a struggle for not just space but meaning and legitimation.

As a scholarly endeavour, GS has made strong inroads into colleges and universities of higher learning often as programmes of study and units, centres and departments of Faculties. Many of such learning centres have offered definitions of their work. While many of the early attempts at meaning making have defined GS in relation to sex roles, responsibilities and expectations with an emphasis on how women/girls and men/boys have been positioned in society, later efforts have tended to either expand that or even contest the tendency to explain sex in terms of performance. It is this latter meaning that is occupying the current academic space and serving to complicate and thus expand notions and perspectives on gender and GS. On the former, one finds works that focus on the justification of women’s household burdens, work abilities and personal/collective value as human and social beings. For instance, the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone Beauvoir can be located in such discourse. Hence, the positionality of women alongside men has tended to pervade the discourse and analysis of gender by raising questions on possibilities and opportunities for women to fulfil themselves and measure up to men. Many such have ended in a dichotomized oppositionality that has simplified gender meanings and raised unnecessary backlash to the detriment of gender causes. Developmentalism has drawn strongly from that trajectory of gender as performance but over time added the dimension of benefits and outcomes to the mix. This has served to push the discourse from the mere legitimation of women as subjugated social actors to a contest over the sharing of gains. While Ester Boserup helped with the positionality and legitimation agenda, the works of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen on women and human capabilities have served to push the boundaries further. Nussbaum and Sen did not only offer a liberatory perspective but have also interrogated the systems and structures for their role in perpetuating gender injustices. This has served to shift the discourse from a focus on women’s abilities to one on their potentials and the contexts that shape their ascribed roles and responsibilities in gendered ways. Like Nussbaum and Sen, among others, the feminist philosopher, Judith Butler in her analysis of gender as performance has raised very critical questions on the shapings and framings of performativity. Her analyses draw attention to the multiple layering of sex/gender roles and the constant struggles that attend the processes of straddling diverse locations and meanings in their performance.

Together, these critical analysts have illuminated the position that GS is not just the mere analysis of sex/gender role performance but also the

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forces and factors shaping and defining them. More importantly, they have pushed the agenda toward looking at the personal location, cultural meanings and social circumstances that define and characterize sex/gender role performance. Thus, GS should entail the analyses of who is assigned what roles and how that assignment defines and sets agenda for the particular and contrived forms of performances to return desired or intended outcomes. It is important to approach performance analysis also from an examination of the intent and purposes of the agenda setters as well as the needs and aspirations of the diverse players. Likened to puppetry, our appreciation of the puppet show should move beyond the dolls to understand the manipulations of the puppeteer, without which there might be no show. It should do this to understand how hierarchies are created and normalized and their place in claims to power and distribution of resources, opportunities, benefits as well as the possibilities and privileges that attend them.

Beyond its focus and content, GS has also been viewed as programme of study. Thus, GS embraces programmes such as Women’s Studies, Men’s Studies, Feminist Studies, Masculinist Studies and Sexuality Studies. Of all the various forms, Women’s Studies appears to be popular and the earliest. The least popular, especially for Ghana and Africa except for southern Africa, is Sexuality Studies. What is wrong with this picture? Why do we make sexuality such a difficult, sometimes even tabooed, subject? The cultural thing, yes, but what about the biological element? Yet, sexuality remains an important part of our existence as human, social beings. Our difficulty of honestly talking about and dealing with the subject of sexuality permeates in not just our school curricula but also our relationships. Our entire collective psychic has been wired to privatize and even domesticate that discussion. We also have conveniently reserved that for the queer community as if eros were only about the so-called oddities that are exclusive of the normative. Worthy of note also is the silence over Men’s Studies and Masculinity Studies. My very first encounter of one such studies in Ghana, was Yao Graham’s (2001) work: Changing the United Brotherhood: An Analysis of the Gender Politics of the Ghana Trade Union Congress, a chapter in Dzodzi Tsikata’s anthology: Gender Training in Ghana: Politics, Issues and Tools. Many of our GS programmes and curricula have tended to stop at Women’s Studies and the performative and relational analysis of men’s and women’s experiences. Until recently, and this is even so for southern Africa, Men’s and Masculinity Studies were largely non-existent. But then, all studies have been Men’s Studies. They have been conducted by men, dominated by men and informed by men’s perspectives. We do not need’s Tarzan’s take on this to understand that it has always been so. Beyond the comprehensive viewing of GS as discussed above, one also finds that GS is treated as a unitary discipline that stands on its own and focuses on the social dynamics and positioning of women in relation to men in society. Such studies explore the various spaces that men and women occupy such as formal and informal sectors, home and work, paid and unpaid employment, or even sector studies such as gender in education,

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sports, leadership and decision-making, politics, economics and agriculture. These sectoral or multi-sectoral analysis persist in illuminating the subjective poisitioning of women in relation to men. Furthermore, we also find GS in various permutations, which suggest that GS can be separated from its other forms. Many such configurations can be found in institutions of higher learning or programming initiatives. Some such configurations are Gender and Women’s Studies; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies and; Gender and Feminist Studies or even Feminist Gender Studies.

Aside the programmatic positioning of GS are the discursive forms which explain gender and GS. Here, one finds scholarly engagements devoted to explaining GS as a subject and its nature; what it is and what it is not. Such can be found in programmes of study, centres of learning, scholarly research and general debates. A typical case is Edward Kisiang’ani’s definition of GS within the context of the Gender Institute of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). The Institute is not an establishment but an annual programme that seeks to nurture critical thinking around African gender issues. It brings together budding African scholars under the tutelage of a senior scholar to tackle an identified gender theme. Framing GS in Africa within the context of a counter-hegemonic discourse, Kisiang’ani (2004: 10), explains that:

In a broad perspective, Gender Studies represent a body of debates, which interrogate the various ways that identities of masculinity and femininity have influenced patterns of human life. For Africa, Gender Studies embrace a profound intellectual effort to query the diverse ways in which both the African woman and man have been represented through Western dissertations. Furthermore, gender research in Africa entails an attempt to highlight the effects of biased Western gender confabulations on Africa and how European prejudices about Africans could be changed.

Kisang’ani’s anti-colonial framing of GS has also been articulated by Oyeronke Oyewumi (1994, 2004), Patricia McFadden (1997) and Ifi Amadiume (1984). In their configurations, they suggest that Africans cannot do GS effectively without locating it within their collective debilitating history of colonialism and imperialism. Here, GS becomes an anti-colonial project. This counter-discursive take, although legitimate as it speaks to the African, also Third World, experience of development, is however not unique. Black Feminism, African Feminism and Third World Feminism, have all evolved from such counter politics and the crisis of meaning and identity.

Further arguing that GS is not synonymous to Women’s Studies, and rightly so, Kisiang’ani drive the point that it is critical for addressing African problems and as such must be decolonized. Rather than distance Africa and African Studies from GS, as some scholars such as Oyewumi appear to do, his criticism ends in a warm embrace that even though

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seeks to shirk GS of its imperialist elements, finds agency in embracing it as a useful political and social tool and cause. His nationalistic take on GS casts an interesting perspective that opens it up for wider criticism and strategic analytical tool. He speaks from an Africanist, anti-colonial standpoint, whose anti-imperialist challenge targets empire-building, discursivity and/or disciplinarity. Indeed, in the short life of GS, to be taken up in the next section, it has been confronted with several internal and external contests. Some which have threatened its very foundations. For instance, there have been debates about how to frame questions regarding the experiences of women; singular or plural. That identity debate that pushed the boundaries of women’s activism, especially in the 1980s, to recognize the diversity of women and thus their experiences has settled on the pluralistic framing of the question. The shift from the woman question to women’s question thus reflects not just the diverse but also multiple locations of women and the multi-layering of women’s experiences. It has sought to resolve the problem of speaking about women as if they were all white, middle class and Western because in reality women are also black, brown, yellow and red. Some are also working class and upper class. So yes, as Sojourner Truth made the case a long time ago: as a black slave, illiterate, rights’ activist and female, who also served as a baby machine for the slave industry, she was still a woman. Truth, in that speech, sparked off probably the most controversial even scandalous internal contest among feminists and gender activists.

As pointed out earlier, there are also those African women like Oyeronke Oyewumi (1994, 2004), who tend to distance themselves from claims to gender as an organizing social principle. Rightly condemning the imperialist layering of gender discourse, Oyewumi (1994), who argues from a rather overgeneralized Yoruba case that gender, concludes that gender is not as important as seniority as an organizing principle of African society. In contrast, others such as Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2004), who also writes from the same Yoruba context and in response to Oyewumi, agrees that we need an anti-colonial and anti-imperial analysis of African society in order to rid it of Western impositions. However, it would be too simplistic and even counter-intuitive to assume and use monolithic criteria in the analysis of power relations and especially when it is based on linguistic and discursive analyses. Indeed, the subject of imperialism persists in many scholarly endeavours especially for cultures that have suffered and/or continue to suffer from Western dominance, economically, politically and socially. Yet, it is too easy to indulge in a romanticization that returns a purist African existence unscathed by the realities of social interactions and the markings that attend them. Puritanist African Studies might have its merit but also dangers. The danger of the wholesale embrace of a static past which jettisons any form of criticism and pretends that all actors enjoyed the same level of sanity and seamless benefit is hypocritical, to say the least. It is dangerous to deny the experiences of those were striped of their citizenship, dignity and humanity and, whose labour was forcibly used without reward. It is hypocritical to pretend that

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African society has always been flat, without hierarchies, and that even when hierarchies have existed they have been for the collective good. That is to say, the slave and working classes should be happy of their exploitation since African monarchism has been for the good of society. It is also hypocritical to neglect the fact of women’s commodification and subjugation, whether in matrimony or not. In fact, it will be malicious to deny the presence of patriarchy since of old and to suggest that women have not been subjugated and that their marginalized social positioning which serves society so well is deserving.

The tendency to normalize social injustice under the banner of natural inequalities is old and deserves critical contestations. Of course, settlers cannot have the same benefits as indigenes but should that call for extortion? Yes, women have biological functions but should that reduce their productive functions into reproductive ones only or even go unaccounted? It is hypocritical to assume that women and girls have enjoyed the same benefits as men and boys in the sharing of the African social space and benefits. Not even Marx, in his days, could pretend that gender was not an issue in his class struggles. It is also hypocritical to suggest that African society is immune to change, internally or externally-driven, or claim that change is necessarily or inherently bad in itself. How else will our societies develop, as they have done, without change? Suffice it to say that change is a necessary part of social progress and human development, in case some of us Africans have not noticed. How can we keep on the pretences when the vestiges of past social injustices and misconceptions of rights and citizenship stare us in the face and continue to haunt us? From where I stand, there are several choices to be made, all of which serve to improve our understanding and analysis of African gender relations and thus contribute to enhancing GS on the continent. We need to understand our history and the contexts in which gender relations have been framed. We could at least be honest in admitting to our own localized imperialisms and oppressions. Indeed, there have also been several debates and contests over the histories and realities shaping our understanding of GS. However, none has been successful in dismissing gender as a social organizer or even modifier to render it redundant. I will be returning to this discussion in a later section. For now, I will continue with the examination of some meanings of GS.

The Gender Studies Centre of Whitman College (2012) of USA explains that:

Gender studies courses focus upon gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. Gender studies uses the concept of gender to analyze a wide range of disciplines. Although many lines of argumentation in gender studies are inspired by feminism, a broad variety of theoretical approaches are used to study the categories of gender. Gender studies includes women's studies, men's studies, and gay and lesbian studies. (httpp:www.whitman.edu/content/genderstudies).

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For Whitman, then, GS is an inter- and/or a multi-disciplinary study that cuts across various disciplines and theoretical positions. Hence, GS is not just about feminism, what I consider to be our biggest phobia in Ghana, but entails several other approaches. Above all, we are quick to dismiss GS as Women’s Studies. Clearly, there is more to GS than we are willing to accept. On its part, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, USA affirms this by first indicating that its:

… curriculum offers students the opportunity to study women and gender (including constructions of masculinity) through an interdisciplinary curriculum taught by the department’s own teaching staff and by members of other departments (over 100 faculty …). Students learn to apply the methods and theories of social scientists, historians, literary critics, etc. to the study of gender” (http://womensstudies.berkeley.edu/about/history).

Clearly, GS offers the benefit of using the tools of varying disciplines to examine society and culture but also their framings of gender. Here in Ghana, where we love to put on the gender lens, we could correct many of our flawed seeings; whether astigmatism, short-sightedness, long-sightedness, total blindness or partial blindness. I wonder how we have worn those lenses. I can say that most of it has been mere talk, some of it has been show off or even malicious, the rest can however be attributed to the use of the wrong lenses, prescribed or self-requested. You will find that out later. But, what is also clear to me is that by putting on the gender lens, correctly that is, we are not only presented with the benefits of seeing clearly, from multiple angles, the workings of relationships and interactions, the effects of policies, programmes and projects but also the political underpinnings of social/cultural norms, beliefs and practices, in ways that we probably would have never imagined. My famous story is that of a colleague who kept teasing me, almost slighting, about my ‘gender thing’ and calling me names until he found himself in a consulting room where the doctor was a woman. Apart from the surprise of meeting such a gendered body in a doctor’s consulting room and function, he had to deal with the discomfort (perhaps shame) of being examined by her. Such was his epiphany and my vindication; yet, he was only getting an examination of the externals. Guess how a woman feels when she has to bare it all to a male gynaecologist! Try having to bare it all in a lonely consulting when you report with a headache or stomach ache; very unconnected, yes! Yet, these are the real experiences of real women in some consulting rooms.

In the University of Ghana, where GS1 seems to have taken roots much earlier compared to other public universities, it has been taught my multiple faculty of diverse disciplinary persuasions. This also affirms the cross-, inter- and multi- disciplinary character of GS. Indeed, it is not 1 Its history is taken up in the next section.

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uncommon to find scholars of diverse disciplinary persuasions, from archaeology to zoology, engaged in gender work. While it preserves its territoriality as an independent disciplinary domain, it also embraces its compelling element of a defiant and subversive discipline. This is because its draws from several disciplines, approaches, theories and methods as well as faculty. Yet, its uniqueness lies in its subversive politics of contesting the patriarchal underpinnings of the traditions, theories and methodologies of those same disciplines. This subversive element is intended to reform traditional disciplines into critical disciplines.

Stressing the need for not just cross-, inter- and multi-disciplinary but also intersectional approaches to Gender and Women’s Studies in Africa, Desire Lewis (2004: 37) explains however that African feminist scholars have been constrained by factors such as working in “universities with very different priorities, insufficient time for exploratory research beyond conventional disciplines, or limited opportunities for conference travel and scholarly collaboration.” This is true not only for GS scholars, however, the tendency to marginalize GS programmes, including their staff and work, serves to truncate the benefits that should inure to the institutions from the perspectives brought to discursive analysis. Besides, as I have suggested elsewhere (Apusigah, 2004) and has been affirmed by Steady (2004), the African gender reality is a multiplex one requiring complex analysis of not just the forces and factors shaping them but also the implications for society and the women and men affected by them.

Pushing the boundaries further, Elisabeth Samuelson (2015) of the Linköping University, adds to our understanding of GS by explaining:

Gender Studies is a transdisciplinary area of study which engages critically with gender realities, gender norms, gender relations and gender identities from intersectional perspectives. To study gender intersectionality means to focus on the ways in which gender interrelates with other social categorizations such as ethnicity, class, sexuality identity, nationality, age, dis/ability etc. Teachers and students of Gender Studies are diverse, but share a belief that women and men, girls and boys, are much more than just gendered stereotypes and cultural "dopes" who simply perform a pre-given gender/sex, defined by a heteronormative two-gender-model. In Gender Studies, we analyse how gender/sex interacts with other social distinctions such as ethnicity, class, sexuality identity, nationality, age, dis/ability etc. We explore how gender, power and norms are intertwined and cannot be understood independently of social and cultural contexts. We scrutinize how various kinds of social injustice, for example, class- and ethnicity-based injustices, often have strong gendered dimensions. A key focus of Gender Studies is the question: how to foster change, make space for diversity and for new kinds of social, cultural and ecological sustainability and equality. Gender Studies educates agents for change.

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(https://www.tema.liu.se/tema-g/grundutb/genvet\?=en)

Quite loaded with meanings that demonstrate the import of GS to us as social beings. Even without the anti-colonial stance, it makes claims that parallel Kisiang’ani’s but extends its boundaries to reflect its politico-social, multiplex and disciplinary orientations. Central to Samuelson’s notion is the fact that GS transcends disciplines. It is not just borderless but beyond borders, over and above. I return to this in later discussions.

Emerging meanings

From the discussions above, it is clear that conceptually, GS has taken multiple forms and particular characteristics. These forms include GS as ‘discipline,’ research, programme and discourse, which are discussed next.

First of all, GS has been understood a as ‘discipline;’ cross-, trans-, inter- and multi-disciplinary. No matter how it has been framed as a ‘discipline,’ GS has established itself not just an area of study but as an important one as such. It has its own established corpus of knowledge with systems and mechanisms for accessing and assessing it. Its corporeality lies in the boundaries that limit it. This is especially so when located within and operated from institutions of learning and more so for institutions of the West such as Europe and North America. As a ‘discipline,’ GS has some set boundaries no matter how floaty, with limits for determining its own epistemologies, assumptions, knowledges, skills, methods and theories. Although it stands with other disciplines, as all disciplines whether Social Science, Natural Science, Arts or Humanities do, it also stands on its own but especially among the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities such as History, Sociology and Psychology. Like other critical Social Sciences such as Cultural Studies, it transgresses disciplines and even dares the so-called Physical or Natural Sciences. It defies the tendency to remain located within the Social Sciences, in its contest of the natural sciences. The disciplinarisation of GS has stemmed from the project of research, teaching and activism, as well as its influences. Yet, it is also from that same project that it defies disciplinarisation and transcends disciplines. This is especially so in the field of activist scholarship, where the search of meanings and histories of masculinist and androgynist foundations of academia becomes the subject for forging transformative change that is inclusive of feminist perspectives. Although starting as an activist, political project, GS has been built on specific assumptions and epistemologies for generating particular forms of knowledges that are recognizable as such. However, as a relatively new and evolving area of study with a mandate of affecting all facets of society, GS has tended to work with, from and within existing disciplines while at the same time establishing itself as a unique area of study. It borrows and learns from other disciplines but its politics of analyzing and transforming, and as a study of society with an emphasis on the

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differential experiences of women and men in it, gives it a unique character and applicability in most sciences; social or physical. This raises questions, because in essence, GS should defy boundaries yet it operates within some limits that are bounded. Hence, it is not any form of study that is considered GS but that which exhibits qualities such as being about women and/or men, informed by liberatory politics and entailing social relational analysis. The disciplinarisation of GS has been fostered by its entry to the Academy where it has been forcefully located in defined spaces such as faculties, departments, centres and units and with and within curricula which are bounded by particular kinds of knowledges based on theories, methodologies and approaches that make it a subject of specialization. As a subject area, where students can offer courses and/or specialise in, it has slowly and steadily established itself within the faculties of social sciences and humanities. In such faculties, one finds courses and programmes often in departments, units and centres, where students can register and pursue GS courses or programmes for degrees, diplomas and/or certificates on their own or with others. Inarguably, the boundaries also define standards and determine the modes of qualification or certification.

Secondly, GS manifests as research or research programmes or projects. By this, it presents as a system of inquiry with mechanisms for deriving knowledge. It draws from particular theoretical and methodological traditions to investigate social phenomena. Starting as criticism and interrogation of society, GS as research has tended to object to the positivistic research tradition for its position on scientific inquiry and the resulting framings of objectivity, methodology, ethics and research purposes. It objects to particular forms of objectivity that strip discourse of its subjects and by so doing objectify and reify them. It is critical of an avid hold on objectivity that alienates bodies involved in studies and especially in positivistic proof of scientificity where statistics replace the bodies that generate them and replicability defines validity and reliability. While GS seeks statistical interpretations, it does so as additional media for appreciating subjective realities and not for its own sake. GS embraces only methods that are critical of the circumstances and conditions of their use as well as their effects on diverse of actors, especially women and men. It seeks and uses ethical standards that extend anonymity and confidentiality to include the benefits and impacts of the research encounter; its processes and products.

Thirdly, many GS initiatives take the form of programmes for analysing and responding to practical gender challenges. As programme, GS is framed as praxis that combines theory and practice for acting for change. This entails not the mere analyses of issues but also the actions that must be taken and actually acting to mitigate the situation. This is when activism meets scholarship and together propel change. This explains why GS almost always includes dimensions for seeking out and building capacities, internally and externally, for informed individual and/or collective action. It also almost always entails the sharing of resources;

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technical, material and human. This is also typically what gender equality and women’s right establishments such as NGOs and Gender Units do. They conduct and apply research, knowledge and skills as evidence for tackling and addressing gendered situations. These could take the form of women’s empowerment, policy reforms, political advocacy and affirmative action. GS strives to engender change wherever it exists.

Fourthly, GS is also discourse; system for interrogating and discussing matters regarding the subjective positioning of women and men in society and the values, meanings, opportunities and benefits that inure to such positionality. As alluded to above and detailed out next, the origins of GS has been discursive. This had taken the form of critical analysis in the form of papers, essays and even letters on the meaning, state and place of women and men in society. However, it goes beyond intellectual exchanges to programming and everyday engagements. As discourse, GS is also a political project. It invites debates and counter debates. It presents as constant, critical analysis of society; its traditions, institutions and processes. It analyses social systems and structures, processes and programmes, resources and opportunities for meanings and activism. This is because historically bodies gendered women and even some men have had to live lives that have been characterised by controversy such as the lack of voice, citizenship and identity. I turn to an examination of the history of GS globally, and in Africa and Ghana, next.

GENDER STUDIES IN HISTORY

Although at the global level GS as practice and research is as old as human civilization, as ‘discipline’ and research, it has been traced to the beginnings of the modernist era coinciding with the renaissance and revolutionary thinking that emerged from that process. In those times where liberalism was taking form, equality and justice concerns of thinkers paved way for mass social reforms but also particular kinds such as political, religious, labour, gender and even racial reforms. Although taking off slowing and eventually gaining significant grounds and relevance in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was only in the 20th century that it established itself in the forms that we know today. In this section, I attempt to examine that history at three levels: globally, continentally and nationally.

At the Global Stage

Although as a global phenomenon, the current form of GS has been traced to the 1970s when it got established in academia. Especially for the West, its earliest beginnings can be traced to as far back as the 18th century when great minds of the revolutionary era stumbled into GS in protest against emerging traditionalist thinking of women’s role in society. The

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surge in interest among especially male thinkers on women’s education and place in society, as part of the Western modernizing process, was met with opposition due to their tendency to domesticate women. The earliest of such gender works have been attributed to J.S Mills, J.J. Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell and Sojourner Truth, among others. These early works had been foisted by debates on human rights and the right to education. Many of them also emerged from within the liberal framework of rights and within the context of freedom, equality and justice. At the time, GS was considered part of the broader agenda of society at the throes of liberating itself from its feudal, Machiavellian past. During those times, GS was not thought of as a ‘discipline’ in its own right but as part of philosophical discourse. However, such beginnings paved way for what we know today as GS. Even for Mary Wollstonecraft, who produced the first ever elaborate treatise on GS in her work, The Vindication of the Rights of Men, which was followed by The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she did not necessarily bear the labels that we are all too familiar of today; feminism and gender activism, even though she has been so tagged by our generation. It is interesting to note that she used the plural tense for men’s rights but singular for women as if there was just the one woman. She lived her time. Before delving into the work of Wollstonecraft, let me first tackle the very earliest beginnings.

Earliest works had taken the form of traveller’s dairies, activists journals, critical essays and declarations, which captured the lives and struggles of women, voyeuristic accounts of non-white women and women’s activism reports. Most of these works date back to the 15th century. However, the most tangible of them were those of the 17th and 18th century Europe, written by women engaged in the revolutionary struggles alongside men. In the 17th century, in particular, two critical works, an essay by a woman only identified, in my search, as Mrs. Makin in her call to revive women’s education titled: An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen. The tag gentlewomen speaks volumes on the tendency for women to be considered worthy companions of the gentlemen of that time. The other was Mary Astell’s essay: Serious Proposal to Ladies in 1694 while in 1697, Daniel Defoe wrote on equal education for women. This trend continued into the 18th Century in the works of liberal thinkers such as J. S. Mill, Edmund Burke, J. J. Rousseau and Charles M. Talleyrand-Perigold, whose works propelled Mary Wollstonecraft’s two quintessential works on GS.

Many of us who enter GS from Education Studies are all too familiar with J.J. Rousseau and his naturalistic philosophy of education. Rousseau’s Emile was first published in French. It is not clear when its French version was first published but its English version was published in 1762 in the same year that the original version was burnt due to what was said to be a controversial section on the Church; the section on the Savoyard Vicar. Rousseau’s work, which established the innate goodness of man (sic) and the fallibility of society, showed how education could be used to nurture the ideal man in the personhood of Emile. It also examined the roles of

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women and men, of which he said what was shared between man and woman was cultural and what was different was natural (sex). It is interesting how even in those early times Rousseau gave some us some food for thought. He defined the nature/culture or heredity/environment debate in a gendered way. Today, we speak of gender as social (cultural creation depending on the context or environment) and sex as biological (of nature). Perhaps, if we had listened more closely to Rousseau we would have forged a more equal society much early in our social evolution, although his proposals for women and men’s education was in gross contradiction. For Rousseau, man and woman were essentially equal however man and woman should be brought up to fulfil what he considered their ideal roles; where the gendering occurred. The roles were to make leaders of men and followers of women. Rousseau’s Sophie, Emile’s female counterpart and future wife, was not a work mate and equal partner but was expected to be passive, weak and put up little resistance. Sophie appears on the scene as a companion who must be educated to become the ideal wife of Emile. Rousseau in his misogynist thinking saw opportunity in tapping to the loose cultural noose to encumber woman into a weak female who could be at the beck and call of a dominant man.

Rousseau’s ideal for women’s education reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a Catholic Priest, now deceased, on Girls Education in my ethic community. At the time, I was researching to write my bachelor’s thesis in Educational Foundations, here in the University of Cape Coast (UCC). This was about two decades ago when I thought little of GS. Boasting of his singular effort at establishing the first girl’s school, the priest said: I observed that our educated men needed educated women to marry. When they complete school and enter work they do not get women who are educated to marry2. The typical Frafra man that he was, marriage was crucial but his singular concern that these new elite men needed elite wives perhaps of sorts that Kobina Sekyi captures in The Blinkards. Perhaps, a Mrs. Mborofosem of sorts who could understand the new language and manners of her husband. At the time, I was only doing a historical study but got drawn into this discussion because I was not getting much on girls or women’s education. In that state of naïve awareness, I became very enthusiastic about sharing his success story and celebrated his efforts at giving women a chance at education. It did not occur to me that women’s education had only one gendered purpose; for women to become good wives. It did not occur to me that my good priest was interested in domesticating women, even at the time that, close to my graduation, I was preparing to return to my workplace and my family. Like many today, I was more interested in the opportunity that he gave women and the possibilities that were offered for their education and not the intent and its limitations. I had returned to study for a university degree after working as a professional teacher and being married with child. Yet, uninformed, I was too naïve to notice that I could not have made the choices that I had made, to be a professional, wife and mother 2 This is a recall of the conversation held in 1993.

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at the same, had I succumbed to the dictates of my appointed mate; my Emile, as Rousseau would have women do.

Although, I had already read bits and pieces of Rousseau’s work in my undergraduate Philosophy of Education class, here in UCC, without my gender lens on, I did not appreciate the sexist aspects of Rousseau’s oft toasted naturalistic educational philosophy. I did not understand that Rousseau sought to make weaklings and wives out of women so they would serve their bit of the social contract, not as citizens in their own rights but as complements of the ideal man, Emile. Of course my reading was anything but critical. I wonder how I would have felt when my goal at the time, as a professional teacher, to reach the highest echelons of the Ghana Education Service, would have been realized under such circumscription. I had also not encountered Mary Wollstonecraft and so did not know that she had already responded for me and the many other women and girls whose life ambitions could have been truncated by Rousseau’s proposal. There were no GS courses or programmes in my Faculty during my university years. I had learned of such being offered by a pioneer woman, then Dr. Mansa Prah, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, but that was out of my reach. I was not even curious to know what GS was all about. Yet, at the time, I did not feel any less equal to my male counterparts in class as many of my kind are made to believe and live by. In fact, I worked hard, if not twice as much, at ensuring I matched my male colleagues by the boot. I knew I deserved everything like everyone else. Yet, I sailed through my university years without any engagement with what would later define my politics so profoundly, years down the line. It was during my graduate years that I encountered not just GS but Feminist Studies in all of its forms. I was privileged to have learned under a critical feminist philosopher. She introduced me to the works of Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, all Black feminists as well as White feminists such as herself. Hence, I encountered and learned from Mary Wollstonecraft and many others in those years. Such exposure also emboldened me to seek out African GS and feminist works. So I encountered Awa Thiam, Marnia Lazreg, Patricia MacFadden, Oyeronke Oyewumi and Ifi Amadiume, among many others. I shall be hinting on some of their works later in this section. In Mary Wollstonecraft, a foremost critic, English writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights, I found, later on, my response to Rousseau and the many others like him. In her work: Animadversions on Some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt, she offers a critical analysis of society’s objectification of women. Even before that word became fanciful among phenomenologists, Wollstonecraft understood its power in capturing women’s oppression. The others that Wollstonecraft directed her criticism were Edmund Burke and Talleyrand-Perigold.

In 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France sparked off a number of responses of what would become known latter as the

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Revolution Controversy. Two of the responses were on his reflection on women, an early work in GS (Butler, 2002). The first of such responses was published by Mary Wollstonecraft. Her first GS work was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which went by quietly. However, it was her later work in response to Burke’s Reflections, titled A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1970, which was first published anonymously3 that got attention. The attention was however short-lived when her identity as a woman was revealed.4Two years later, in 1792, a similar title by Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, got popular acclaim. These could be considered the earliest Masculinist Studies as they challenged and even mocked traditional notions on men’s entitlements.

Wollstonecraft’s later and most acclaimed work, A Vindication on the Right of Woman published in 1792, was feminist by all standards. It was a response to Talleyrand-Perigold’s 1791 Report to the French National Assembly, in which he recommended that women receive domestic education. As Osborne and Kissel (2015) have argued, Wollstonecraft, dedicated her Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Talleyrand-Perigold out of distaste for his ideas on women’s education. Earlier on, she had put together an anthology for the “improvement of young women” called The Female Reader (Todd & Butler, 1989; Macdonald & Scherf, 1997). Amid all that discursive turmoil, in 1791, French feminist, Olympe de Gouges, published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. These episodic events and seminal writings of existentialist philosophers and political critics set the tone for the gender debates and collections but also the political debates in both France and Britain of that century, especially during the period leading up to the 19th century.

In the 19th Century, outside of Europe, the Women’s Rights Movement was also to give birth to some early works on GS. Key among them was the famous treatise, Ain’t I a Woman of 1851 by a Black woman activist named Sojourner Truth. Truth was not just a Black woman but also an ex-slave, abolitionist, civil rights campaigner, women’s rights activist, preacher, author and public speaker. As an illiterate black woman, she had no access to the tools and methodologies of research for generating any critical theory on GS but the speech that she delivered at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, USA rendered her audience morbid. It scandalized the women’s rights movement and shook the very foundations of civil rights movement thus catapulting her to fame as a revolutionary thinker. Yet, that speech was delivered with guts, from her heart, based on her experiences in the anti-slavery and revolutionary movement but especially in reaction to counter arguments to women’s rights demands in the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848. When granted permission to speak after some hesitance, Truth delivered what later become known as the Ain’t I a Woman? speech. That gutsy, thought-provoking speech questioned and shook the very foundations of American society and its treatment of women as delicate, domestic beings who 3 Perhaps for the same reason the authors like George Best use male pseudonyms.4 When revealed her work was vilified and ignored.

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must be led by men into carriages and live in the shadows of men and not operate as whole humans with citizenship rights of their own (Mabee & Newhouse, 1993; Stetson & David, 1994, Grigsby, 2015). Her speech did not only turn around the fortunes of the rights movement at the time but also the black (men and women) and women’s history in the Americas. For us in Africa and Ghana, Truth’s speech and involvement in women’s rights activism should be invigorating and her context and motivation should present no surprise as even today the imperialist contests of GS remain strong in the sinister attempt to undermine gender work. There are however some genuine anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist thinking such as Kisiang’ani and Oyewumi, who offer critical insights for re/conceptualizing social relations and making African sense of women and men’s position in it, even if they are not without their own challenges.

At the same time that Truth was stirring up trouble in America, in Europe, Harriet Taylor Mill produced The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), which raised critical issues on the rights of women. This was followed by her husband, J. S. Mill’s, the famed economist, text in 1869, The Subject of Women.

However, the 20th century was probably the breakthrough era for GS, where the two world wars, civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement and the post-war development of Europe shaped social discourse and the discourse on rights and civil liberties including women’s rights, critically. Foremost, among the GS thinkers of the period were Virginia Wolf, an English writer and novelist and Simone de Beauvior, a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist and social theorist. In an introduction, Morag Shiach (1992: xii), states:

In these two essays, Virginia Woolf, develops an innovative and politically challenging analysis of the causes and effects of women’s exclusion from British cultural, political, and economic life. Starting from a consideration of the troubled relations between women and fiction in A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf moves on to much broader analysis of the political and cultural implications of women’s oppression in Three Guineas (1938).

On her part, de Beauvoir’s work: The Second Sex of 1949, presented detailed analysis of women’s oppression. The Second Sex is considered a foundational text for contemporary feminism, although Beauvoir had not identified herself or her writings in the context of feminism at the time.

The scholarly productions as well as the social change processes of the time especially after the war years and post-war reconstruction of Europe and America, triggered reform processes that gave fresh impetus to GS later down that century. Into the 1960s, GS took on some sense of urgency especially within higher education but also activism among women’s liberation activists, when it got deepened and broadened. As pointed out:

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Gender & Women’s Studies originated in the 1960s as a result of political critiques of the marginalizations of important groups and perspectives within the education system. Gender & Women’s Studies has since broadened, deepened, and has become an established scholarly field” (https://www.trentu.ca/womensstudies/).

These activist, philosophical criticisms and reactionary writings of the war era had laid the foundation for GS in Europe, North America and perhaps the rest of the world. Two works that revolutionized GS at the time, following the two European greats, were Women: The Longest Revolution by Juliet Mitchell in 1966 and Sexual Politics by Kate Millet in 1968. Against the backdrop of the raging socialist revolution, Mitchell and Millet positioned GS as not just a mere reactionary process but more importantly as a histo-political project predating any other revolution. Together with Second Sex and the Vindication, they form the classics of GS and especially Feminist Studies.

It is noteworthy, however, that GS did not evolve in the same way across the globe. For the West, with its then evolving liberal egalitarian rights regime, the discourse had centred largely on men and women in a dichotomized oppositionality as if gendering occurred only within that neat divide or affected only women and all women in the same way. It ignored pretty much the lessons of the past decade regarding race and class. Even when Marxism stepped in, its analysis of gender was not immune from middle class view of women as domestics. Hence, its initial discourse, especially by Engels, was to make women workers so they could have a legitimate place in the class struggles. (As if women were not already working!). For the early Marxists, women were mere reproducers whose empowerment could happen if they migrated to the production space. It was against this Marxian misunderstanding of sex politics that Shulamith Firestone (1970) in reference to its dialectical materialist analysis and methods, explained that “in creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels: not their literal opinions about women – about the condition of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognising it only where it overlaps with economics but rather-their-analytic method.” (https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/firestone-shulamith DA: 2nd July 2015)

Other GS and feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Carolyn Heilbrun, among others, followed in similar trends. However, when non-Western critics entered that discourse with counter discourses pointing out the grey areas, they triggered fundamental changes which made the discourse more nuanced and inclusive. Even within the West, starting with Sojourner Truth and the later works of black women such as Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, major shifts were made to position GS in the politics of equality discourse; as not just about sameness but also difference.

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Like their foremother Truth, the later day black feminists contributed to GS by taking on and shaking the very foundations of liberal feminism. They introduced their own brand of radical feminist politics that paved way for intersectional discourse to include race, colour, class, black men and sexuality. They also targeted their advocacy at not just white middle class men but also women by raising questions that further challenged and radicalized women’s rights advocacy. Above all, they have remained rooted in their communities where there is learning and sharing while mobilizing less privileged sisters but also brothers toward equitable social change. While embracing the broad claim to women’s citizenship rights, they also demand women’s rights to motherhood and black men’s rights. In that society, where black men have been infantilized and criminalized, it has been imperative for Black feminists to take an inclusive rather than adversarial that form, where Black women’s and men’s oppression were central to discourse and advocacy. For the colonised bodies of the global south including South America, Africa and Asia, the politics of class, nationalism and socionomics were important. Women’s labour and human rights, cultural and ethnic rights and the rights of working class men and women were key in the debate. The anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s offered opportunities for inserting feminist voices and gender analysis in the new statist, developmentalist movement. The debates and discourses as well as the activisms of that time paved way for the institutionalization of GS in later years as we know it now.

Samuelson (2015) explains that GS in higher education is very recent laying its roots in the 1970s. An important text of that period, which shaped GS on development policy was the economist, Ester Boserup’s, work on Women’s Role’s in Economic Development, which shook the foundations of development and paved way for more critical gender and development studies. Her study changed the way women’s work was viewed, from supportive to active producer roles. In her analysis of farming systems, she unveiled and clarified women’s and men’s roles in farm production as well as the social dynamics shaping them as distinct in many ways. That work threw out Margaret Mead’s traditionalist notion of women as supporting labour, which bore semblance with Marxist notions. Earlier on, in 1965, Boserup’s work on the Conditions of Agricultural Growth, which focused on agrarian change under population pressures also shook the foundations of Malthusian Theory. Old, traditionalist theories on women and their roles and place in society as domestics and willing subjugated beings were shaken. This period also marked the era where several debates from Politics, History, Critical Theory, Sociology and Philosophy resulted in and set the stage for the major theoretical and methodological positions such as the Standpoint Theory and Feminist Epistemology. Theoreticians such as Sandra Harding, Germaine Greer, Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy Smith, Joan Scott, Joan Butler, Lorraine Code and Linda Alcroft came into their own by pushing the traditional boundaries further in the 1980s and 1990s. Such works also gave

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legitimacy to feminism as an ideological basis of GS and gave sexuality, black and queer politics and studies, legitimate space within the GS architecture, at least in the West.

Here again, outside traditionalist Westernized thinking, the works of Chandra Mohanty, Gayatiri Spivak, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherie Moraga and Vandana Shiva, among others, came into the scene strongly with their radical Third World feminist perspectives in the 1980s and 1990s. It was also an era, when Western feminists sought solidarities (i.e., sisterhood) with other sisters and established the need for difference and diverse feminisms but also a global feminism. Robin Morgan’s anthology, Sisterhood is Global, which included Ama Atta Aidoo’s work: To Be a Woman, was one such efforts. It was also a time and period where criticisms of colonialism and imperialism but also the discourse of sameness and difference loomed large in GS discourses. It was a period when it was not enough to speak of woman as if our experiences were same but more appropriately to portend an inclusive framing of the female or feminine experience pluralistically as women’s experiences. By that, GS was shifted from its Western, elitist (middle class), universalizing position to engage in one that was inclusive of women of varied classes, breed and creed. It was a period characterized by growing scholarship on difference feminisms such as Black feminism,5 Third World feminism and African feminism. It also marked a period of transformative GS discourse.

The GS mix of activism and scholarship also served as the basis for what has been called developmentalist GS. Developmentalist GS was to gain grounds in the 1980s and 1990s, as the global North countries, through their overseas development agencies, were pushed to integrate gender in their work. This was to result in not just the creation of gender institutions and portfolios, filled by expatriate gender officers who served as policy advisers offering technical support but who also disbursed funds and by so doing set the agenda for working with donors. Starting out largely as foreign experts in the overseas development cooperation with little to no experience of the situations and conditions of the southern countries on whom they offered advice, largely for country and empire, rather than gender and justice, these femocrats positioned themselves as champions of women’s oppression. Drawing largely from their cultural contexts and failing to appreciate their advantaged position as operatives of their respective metropoles, these femocrats had helped to create conditions and given reason for the imperialist backlash that characterised GS at the time with remnants even for this day. Amina Mama (1995) has called them femocrats and their practice developmental feminism (Mama, n.d.) in protest of their flag hoisting posturing within the industry and in their relations with gender actors of the countries they preside over. Such posturing has served to muddy their loyalties as many have tended to raise and defend the imperial flags that they bear at the expense of social justice and women’s rights. Undoubtedly, when and where femocrats 5 Feminism as an ideological position that legitimates women’s experiences, advocates on the dignity of women and equality of the sexes as a radical process for being truly human.

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have acted with feminists they have been able to neutralise their naive take on Third World gender but when they have collaborated with their local replicas, GS has been shallow and counterproductive.

Some of the important influences of social change of those times and within the develomentalist movement have included the UN processes such as the decade of women, theme years, conferences on women and the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW), which have created platforms for sharing knowledge and strategies and for the development of policies as well as for holding governments accountable. For instance, the CSWs are well established as fora within the UN system that hold governments and their national gender machineries to render accounts but also for NGOs to showcase their works, initiate their lobbies and shadow their governments (gender activism). The UN processes have served to promote research and documentation as well as policy development and monitoring while unlocking resources for country level activism. Thus, the UN activities have had significant and challenging implications and impacts for country level work.

Moving into the 21st century, globally GS had to take on more transnationalist agenda including eco-feminism, informal sector lobbies including sex work and women’s labour rights and, specific themed mobilizations around domestic violence, violence against women, women’s reproductive health and sexuality rights, among others. Others have included mobilizations around food security and sovereignty, land rights, safe motherhoods, inclusive education and access to justice, among others. The UN System gender programme, then UNIFEM, now UN Women, has helped mobilize resources to support research, capacity-building trainings and global, regional and national/local advocacy. Kate Young and Margaret Snyder were of that breed and also Third World women, including African women, such as Bina Aggarwal, Gita Sen and Mary Tadesse. At the regional/continental level, the UN processes, especially the hosting of the Nairobi Conference on Women, Equality and Development in 1985, which resulted in the Forward Looking Strategies, forced African governments to rethink their positions, wake up from their slumber and create platforms for promoting gender equality and women’s rights at the continental and national scale. I turn next to the African stage. The African Regional Stage

In an introduction to her book; Readings on Gender Studies in Africa, Andrea Cornwall, offers a glimpse of the voyeurism that characterised early works on women of the continent, which could be considered GS. In that anthology, which brought together some of the earliest and critical formal GS works on Africa by African and non-African scholars and, women and men, on and outside the continent, Cornwall (2005: 1) explains:

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Once writ small in the accounts of travellers, missionaries and colonial officials, sub-Saharan Africa women have become the subjects of an extensive literature over the last thirty years. From efforts to inscribe women into a canon marked by their relative invisibility, to studies that sought African evidence to challenge assumptions about women’s political and economic capabilities, early writings on gender in Africa was largely about women and by women. As women’s studies came to embrace the study of the construction of gender relations, attention turned to processes and structures through which women’s and men’s identities and relationships were mediated.

The shared experience of gender-based marginalizations in human history and historiography is reflected in African GS. The story of Saartjie Baartman, then called Sara Batman or the “African Hottentot,” for her unique African feminine features, has been painfully re/told, by the Baartman Centre of South Africa, in its restorative project. Not only was Madam Baartman caged and displaced as a spectacle for European gaze, African women’s bodies were scandalized; they were subjected to the ridicule and humiliation of erotic adventurism. Madam Baartman’s story is epitomic of the white male colonizer’s dirty writings on African women’s bodies. Through not just the treasures and booties they carried back home but also the little brown bodies that they left behind as tokens of brute and untamed desire and contemptuous pleasures with raped women and/or willing concubines; they scathe African womanhood.

As already hinted above, femocracy and developmental feminism of the 1970s and 1980s had formed and still forms a critical part of the history of GS on the African continent. Africa’s post-independence development challenges, following the militarization of government and governance in many countries as well as the enduring dictatorship of long serving freedom fighters turned political demotriachs6 had resulted in social turmoil and the collapse of many economies. Many countries thus turned to the North for support in the form of development aid: grants and loans, which were accompanied with technical support. Other social upheavals such as conflict and war, famine and disease, apartheid, lingering neo/colonialism and globalisation played varying roles to result in the social instability and economic crises that have pushed the countries and peoples deeper and closer to dependency on the already imperial global North. As argued by several feminist and gender scholars, these dire conditions had been compounded to worsen the plight of women (Manu, 1997; Awumbila, 2001; CWMG, 2004). These have served to erode even the limited space that women have wielded within African society by committing them to states of dehumanization and lives of indignity as their social conditions worsened.

6 Long staying democratic leaders who have turned themselves into demagogues and their rule into dynasties such as we have and have had of the Nguemas of Gabon, Gnaissingbes of Togo and Bongos of Equatorial Guinea as well as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Biya of Cameroun and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

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On the flipside, developmental GS has also resulted in several collaborations including research development and institution building. Connecting GS to activism, Abiola Odejide (nd: 1) explains that it was the “members of the women’s activist group, the National Council of Women’s societies, like Adetowun Ogunsheye and Awe, who initiated serious research into women’s status in Nigeria. ... By the time the United Nations Decade for Women was inaugurated, the seeds of women’s activism had been sown in the politically active city of Ibadan and also at the University of Ibadan.” The same can be said of Sierra Leone of today, where women academics and the Centre for Gender Research and Documentation of the University of Sierra Leone worked hand in hand in community-based women’s organizations within the women’s peace movement. Adetowun Ogunsheye wrote: The Role and Status of women in Nigeria in 1960 while Bolanle Awe, a historian, educator and gender activist, wrote: The Iyalode in Traditional Yoruba Political System in 1977. These early works, which tended to be restorative, sought to illuminate and recast Nigerian women and for that matter African women as not mere victims but also active producers and political leaders in their society. Their works share meanings with the later work of Ifi Amadiume around kinships and matriarchies in Africa. We are all too familiar with the legend of the powerful West African trade queens. In the 192Os, the Nigerian Women’s War (Mallick, 2011; Mba, 1982) and the Yaa Asantewaa War of Gold Coast (now) Ghana, gave credence to that legend. Much later writers such as Efua Sutherland, Ama Atta Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head used their creative writing to communicate their politics by telling women’s stories and telling them in ways that only they as African women knew them.

The 1980s and 1990s saw more radical GS works on the continent including Awa Thiam’s Speak Out, Black Sisters, Marnia Lazreg’s Eloquence of Silence, Ifi Amadiume’s Female Husbands and Male Daughters and Oyeronke Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (1997) whose radical criticisms of feminism and Western imperialism have helped to reshape African GS and feminist scholarship: methodology and theory. At the same time, there were also traditionalist thinking about women, within the gender and development framework in the works of Mary Tadesse and Mary Snyder in their work African Women and Development: A History in 1995 and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s African Women and Another development of 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the critical GS works by Amina Mama, Patricia McFadden, Sylvia Tamale, Desiree Lewis and Jane Bennet helped trouble the terrain, stir up discomforts and open the Pandora box for engaging with GS from critical but also interdisciplinary and intersectionality trajectories.

GS at the regional level has also been promoted by civil society initiatives. These include the efforts of the Association of African Women on Research and Development (AAWORD). AAWORD was founded as an anti-colonial initiative to promote independent research for activism and development. As noted by AAWORD:

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The “colonisation” of African research and use of women as research objects resulted, among others, in overlooking the historical and sociocultural realities in data analysis and interpretation. This led to the proliferation of subjective writings on the social conditions and participation of women in the development process of the African continent. (…) Faced with this situation and in light of the still important weight of external perceptions on the solutions to these issues at the time, AAWORD set itself the mission to build a strong African women’s movement, combining human rights and development theory and practice, by throwing itself into research and providing its contribution to sustainable development in the continent and the anchoring of democracy. The question is still today for AAWORD to contribute to building a democratic, fair and egalitarian African society. (http://www.afard.org/vision_missionand.php)

AAWORD brings together scholars and activists to share and strategize for non-violent African development through the promotion of women’s rights and gender justice.

Akina Mama wa Africa (AMwA) is another civil society initiative that has had great influence on the development of GS on the African continent. Its work with women and activists has resulted in methodological frameworks, training of leaders and research products. It was established in the UK in 1985 as a small community-based organisation for migrant African women. Today, AMwA has blossomed into a pan-African organization with a large number of alumnae. Its flagship programme, the African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI) which was first started in 1996/1997 was first organized to train young African women in leadership or those with leadership aspirations to do so effectively. Today in Ghana, alumnae of the AWLI can be found in industry and academia.Another important regional initiative is the establishment of the Africa Gender Institute (AGI) of the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. The AGI was a result of the Equal Opportunities Research Project of UCT of 1992. It was instanced by Dr. Mamphela Ramphele in 1993, with a mandate to contribute to challenging the imbalances resulting from persistent gender discrimination and inequality, and exacerbated by racism in higher education institutions in Africa. After extensive consultations in West, East and Southern Africa, the AGI was established in 1999 and charged to provide a safe space where women in the academy could develop intellectual and leadership capacities. As explained by Amina Mama (2009):

It began with a series of intellectual networking and outreach activities to develop feminist thinking and pedagogies rooted in and responsive of African contexts and conditions. … Between 2000 and 2002, we located and surveyed thirty dedicated units doing some form of teaching and/or research in GWS. While it was clear that the

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field was rowing, our mapping exercise also revealed the isolation and precariousness of gender and women’s studies units, and the conservative intellectual and institutional terrain that was constraining the emergence of a coherent body of locally grounded feminist scholarship. …. In terms of intellectual content our reviews founds that much of the teaching and research being undertaken by the existing units reflected an integrative ‘women in development (WID)’ industry approach rather than a critical feminist perspective. … as the mapping process proceeded, we became clearer about the need to engage critically with the predominance of instrumental work that serviced the development industry in depoliticized ways that focused on narrow, technical gender analysis, geared to the production of gender-training manuals and services. (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/conf-proceedings/n l s/full/fr2 ....)

Such was the beginnings of the now popular AGI. Since then it has grown by the leaps to become a space where African women writers, researchers, policy makers and practitioners are given opportunities to engage in critical research and, education and training on gender, transformation and democratic practice in Africa. It offers training workshops, research residences and teaching opportunities. Its key champions Amina Mama and Jane Bennet have worked tirelessly to realize and sustain its mission. The AGI also hosts the Gender and Women’s Studies listerv where information is shared, topical issues discussed, activisms mobilized and networking promoted. It also hosts the famed Feminist Africa, a journal of critical feminist scholarship in the form of featured articles, creative works, profiles and conversations. Today, the AGI is firmly established as an organizational unit, in the form of a department within the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities with a Chair in Gender Studies

The AGI has served as an important training ground for gender activists, researchers, scholars and practitioners from across the continent. It has also built research groups around selected themes including sexual harassment, gender and sexuality, peace and conflict, land and livelihoods and entrepreneurship, among others. Today the UCT in collaboration of the AGI and the Department of Gender Studies awards qualifications from bachelor’s through masters to doctoral degrees to students from across the continent. Perhaps, due to proximity, it has had great impact on Southern Africa compared to the rest of Africa.

Finally, there is the Gender Institute of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). The Institute is an annual forum for young African scholars working on a common theme to share and improve their research under the tutelage of a senior scholar. Papers of the Institute are published as books in the form of the CODESRIA Gender Series and circulated widely as reference materials. CODESRIA also sometimes dedicates its conferences, workshops and seminar to GS.

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On the whole, GS in Africa has, over the years, garnered some clout and acceptability in intellectual and popular discourse and in academia, politics, economics and education as well as in national, sub-regional and regional platforms. It has contributed in shaping reformist social discourse and inclusivist policies and programmes on the continent. There are various regional and national networks, which work to promote GS and gender equality and women’s rights. Since 2005, when the African Feminist Charter was developed with several countries following suit with their own national Charters, there appeared to be a virtual collapse of the feminist and gender phobia, at least among GS practitioners. Many of Africa’s big higher education institutions (HEIs) including the UCT now have institutes, departments or centres for GS. These include Makerere University, University of Ghana, University of Sierra Leone/Fourah Bay College, University of Western Cape, University of Ibadan, University of Cameroun and Kenyatta University. Also, the African Universities Association (AUA), has attempted to mainstream gender in its work with universities but not much has been rolled out in the end. The African Union (AU), like the UN, has a Gender System that works with sub-regional unions to promote research, dialogue and action on gender equality. Its main goal is to realize the AU Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality and the African Charter on Human Rights Optional Protocol on Women’s Rights. Thus, it has focused on the promotion of research, training, advocacy and policy issues.

On the whole, one finds that at the regional or continental stage, GS is not just a programme of study, target of advocacy and research but also a political project with policy and programming implications and influences at and beyond the regional level.

The Ghana Stage

Ghana emerged from its colonial past, already showing some sense of gender awareness regarding the need to empower women to participate more effectively in the new and emerging state, even if nominally (Nkrumah 1960; Tsikata, 1999). As Tsikata (1999) has pointed out, the early postcolonial efforts were mired in the co-optational politics that served statist and nationalist interests at the expense of the woman cause. State and nationalist patronage were offered to women as a means to mass mobilization and women’s empowerment. However, in practice it became an inducement to divide and weaken the increasingly politicizing women’s front. That era, which was characterized by a seemingly women-friendly political breeze was also tainted by unsavoury sexist criticism, partisanization of women’s movement building, invasion of women’s spaces and rapid stigmatization of particular categories of women such as traders and politicians. It set the pace for the formalization of patriarchy in our government system, where women have been continually disadvantaged and persistently been subjected to various forms of violations.

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Yet, against the background of a strong allegiance to our ethnic traditions with their own formulations of gender relations, often disadvantaging women, the new Ghanaian state’s history of pushing an inclusive anti-colonial unitary state with an egalitarian promise was expected to deliver socially inclusive programmes and gender justice to all of its citizens. The extent to which that expectation has been met in the politics and programmes of the new state and those after is visibly clear for all to see in an ever gendered society. The eventual neglect of the masses and lower classes who formed the bulk of the anti-colonial movement and the particularly deprived groups whose allegiances were sought on the pedestal of egalitarianism under the mantra of freedom and justice, I dare say, were further pushed under the rugs of deprivation in an era of a burgeoning indigenous elite class. The result is the widespread structural injustices and grave inequalities that confront us today as a country. The grave socio-economic inequalities and their attendant injustices are glaring enough for all to see. However, we cannot rule out the fact that some actions have been taken. Yet, the requisite commitment in the form of concerted actions expected to yield sustainable change remain far-fetched. Since this analysis is about GS, let me keep my focus as such. We know for instance of the very early effort at gender leveraging in the form of the Representation of the People’s (Women Members) Bill, which brought 10 women members into the Parliament of Ghana in 1960. Worthy of note also is the mass mobilization of anti-colonialist women’s groups into party wings and national women’s organizations in those early days (Tsikata, 1997; Apusigah, Tsikata & Mukhopadhay, 2011).

Indeed, as a liberalizing country, Ghana and its leaders have upheld the colonial heritage of Western liberal orthodoxy with its hedged values on rights, equality and justice. However, as many critics of liberalism have demonstrated, the liberal versions of rights, equality and justice have not always been all that liberal as in being altruistic (Elson, 1999; Mbilinyi, 1999; Social Watch Ghana, 2006). Perhaps, liberalism’s avid privileging and particular counter-posturing of individualized against collectivised rights, unabashed freedom against regulated markets, hyper profiteering against shared profits and; aggregated against distributive growth, have received the most criticism for the ways that they have structured society and privileges, giving some almost all leaving others with almost nothing.

Such was the state of the new Ghanaian state with both pre-colonial and colonial baggage that the independence leaders had to unravel if their egalitarian promise were to hold. For this analysis, a key expectation of the new state was its handling of the sins of paternalism and patriarchy. It therefore made sense that at its earliest beginnings some form of GS entered into the discourse on the radical socio-economic transformation of a country in search of new citizen patriots committed to national development. Yet, most of what happened at the time was a new amalgamationist patronage regime that took advantage of the mobilizing power of women, also youth and the trade unions, to foist its partisan

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politics on unsuspecting groups to the peril of autonomy, legitimacy and justice (Tsikata, 1999). Of course there were also the social development policies such as universal primary education and women’s political representation, to name a few, that inured to the benefit of women. These issues have been central to GS in that era.

From the 1970s on, apart from actively engaging at the global and continental levels in discourses seeking to correct gender inequalities resulting in the endorsements of several declarations and treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the African Charter on Human Rights, and participating in processes such as the conferences and dedicated events for women, local equivalents have also been developed in the form of the Ghanaian constitutional provisions on Human Rights and Women’s Rights as well as the promulgation of policies and legislation and, establishment of systems and structures such as the national machinery on women and gender. In fact the Gender Studies and Human Rights Research and Documentation Centre (Gender Centre), had religiously monitored the CEDAW for years. All these have had implications for GS regarding its discursive leanings, institutional context and policy research. Starting from 1975, ground-breaking efforts have been made to somewhat institutionalise GS in our social polity resulting in policy reforms, research and documentation and programming interventions that built capacities, generated knowledge and skills, monitored progress on commitments and tackled and tracked practical change in local communities and the institutions of the state. However, progress on GS in Ghana could be consigned to the 1980s, considered an epoch period for the growth and institutionalization of developmentalism in academic discourse and political economy. Constrained by our own shortcomings dating back to our long history of militarism and political instability and the resulting socio-economic degradations, the country was opened to the dictates of the Washington Consensus through the structural adjustments that the two Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and IMF, contrived and managed. Today as I speak, we are back in full cycle, if I may say so, at the door steps of Bretton Woods. Needles say that that era of developmentalism gave a fresh lease on gender work and helped legitimate GS in our body polity. That era has had two clear markings: economics and socionomics.

In the period of economics, development efforts were focused on reversing the deplorable economic indicators. The state and its donors decked up to stabilize and halt the ever plummeting rate of domestic production levels, the gross domestic product (GDP) rate. Governments and donors teamed up to reverse the hyper-inflationary trends. High interest rates, poor balance of payments and high foreign exchange rate, among others, seemed to matter more than unemployment rates, school dropout rates and mortality rates. Hence, it was easy to send workers packing home, school children running the streets and mortuaries flooded

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with bodies that were. Yet, the short life of the seeming period of bliss, became an important wake up call to all; not just the Ghanaian state but also its donors. It was only when that era of developmentalism found need for socionomics, when economic and social indicators mattered, that GS found grounds and credibility in state policy and practice. Research and advocacy made that possible. It has been suggested by several anti-liberal activists such as Mariama Awumbila, Diane Elson, Takyiwaa Manu, Dzodzi Tsikata and Yao Graham that that era of structural adjustments reversed whatever breakthroughs and gains that had accrued to the era before it for both its patrimonious and patriarchal inequities.

The period of socionomics or the return to it has meant that development policies would pay equal attention to economic growth and social justice. That era was marked with an instrumentalist urgency as poverty and human degradation stared at many in the face. The widespread poverty with its particular manifestation on women; the feminization of poverty, made a lot of gender sense. It made sense to put people, especially deprived women and men, back to work in order to keep them free from hunger, disease and squalor. Today, we speak of social protection but who would need protection if they had social justice. The expectation of socionomics, to my mind, is that we avoid the risks that create vulnerabilities so we could halt wasting time and resources in search for additional resources to clean up the mess. By the way, when you mess up people’s lives, you mess them up for good! How much catching up can you offer to erase the hurts and pains or clean up the indignities that become their portion? Indeed, socionomics was welcomed because of the pressures, local and international, for government and state institutions to act for change.

Overnight, mainstreaming gender became an important mantra and everyone was mainstreaming themselves up to God knows what. The exception has been that most of it was in workshops, conferences and seminars, most of which were up to no benefit to the women and men who have been so badly gender marked. The failure of even the more humane socio-economics have been documented broadly. What remains is a new model with better promise, a subject worthy of exploration elsewhere. Suffice it to say, however, that socionomics was not all a failure. It re-awakened not just the Ghanaian state and its donors but also civil society to the need for GS. I must say that most of the anti-gender backlash of our time, particularly the imperialistic plea, has been ill-informed by the pressures of that era. What has been ignored is the fact that the gendered realities of those marked bodies have not been the mere creations of our time but also those of bygone era and unless there are consistent, collective measured interventions that are based on that history and supported with informed discourse and evidence (gender research), our persistent socio-economic injustices would stay with us for far longer that we can imagine.

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The exigencies of the time, manifested in the development struggles of the Ghanaian state, also its work with donors, now choosing to be called development partners, made gender sense. In fact, donors made gender demands in their partnership with not only the state but also civil society. This situation unleased new realities which challenged the existing system and rocked our social fabric together with the contracts that attended them resulting in the explosion of gender equality and women’s rights mobilizations. There emerged a sudden upsurge and level of reformism (not transformation, gender struggles remain active today) in mainstream thought, organizations and institutions to the new reality of gender sensibility. I call it the era of gensensibilation, due to its false sense of success when most of it was mere rhetoric and shallow, contorted responsiveness.

Gensensibilation is about showing a certain level of reasonableness that gender is an issue and preparedness to act for change based on the drive to be politically correct. Thus, one had to declare an awareness of, proven or not, and openness to take action to improve the conditions of women to be gender sensible. It took form in enrolment in an agenda for social change claimed to be gender aware, sensitive and inclusive. It required a show of evidence for acting out gender commitments even if that action does not amount to real change. In that era, many proposals were written by organizations with no history or clear commitment to gender equality or women’s rights but got funded because it was the in-thing. Indeed, as it became the practice of the time, one had to profess a gender orientation and confess a gender sense. One just had to show that gender was part of their work objectives and they would earn resources that were hitherto unavailable. Many advocacies and researches were conducted and several capacities built. Gender consultants emerged overnight, many with no exposure whatsoever to gender training, discourse and/or advocacy. The sudden upsurge in the demand for gender experts resulted in the commercialization of GS and thus draining it of its politics and activism. Development agencies in particular contracted their cronies and whoever was convincing enough, in a proposal, to conduct research, advocacy and trainings. That situation watered down the effort to legitimate GS as a discipline through its weak programmatic choices and shallow politics.

In contrast, the happenings of that period, presented gender challenges that provoked new politics and studies led by the emerging gender leaders resulting in several ground-breaking efforts which have served to shape the GS terrain today and especially from the 1990s on. Even before that time, FIDA which had been formed in the 1970s and by Akua Kuenyehia, as a voluntary organization of largely female lawyers but also some male allies, was championing advocacy and research on women’s access to justice. Critical to that effort was the mobilization of lawyers to offer pro bona services to deprived women and children, as well as the promotion legal reform advocacy. FIDA’s work contributed to the enhancement of women’s access to justice, not only through the legal

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services that were rendered but also research and trainings. The women, but also men, champions of that era who dedicated themselves and continue to do so even today, did so out of sheer commitment to the gender cause. FIDA did not only render services, it also investigated cases and produced research that, together with others, guided gender responsive affirmative action initiatives and legal reforms from the 1990s on.

Notable, also, is that many of the foundational works in Ghana today including the quintessential anti-violence publication of the Gender Centre, edited by Cathy Cusack and Dorcas Coker-Appiah, the anthology: Breaking the Silence and published in 1993 belonged to that era. The GSHRDC is one of several country level initiatives dotted across the continent. It continues to thrive in its research, activisms and capacity-building efforts. Others before include works by Ama Atta Aidoo especially her piece in Sisterhood is Global titled To Be a Woman of 1988 and others I am not privy to, illuminate women’s issues and rights as part of the effort to explain how gender manifests and how social systems and structures exclude women or undermine their roles and contributions. Much of the studies of that era had focused on how gendered meanings were contrived and imposed on men and women to create inequalities.

The 1990s were also characterised by flourishing discourses that served GS. For instance, after years of working within the establishment, the national machinery for women and the university system, Florence Dolphynne produced in 1991 what she called an African response to ongoing gender debates. The Emancipation of Women catalogued her experiences working within the UN system and building a national machinery. As well, she offers analysis of women’s lived realities of under-privilege and makes proposals for intervening to correct the gender wrongs. Later works during that era include those by Takyiwaa Manu, Esther Ofei-Aboagye and Dzodzi Tsikata, which have tended to focus on a range of issues from politics, economics to human rights. This was also the period when there were extensive engagements at the level of the state on gender mainstreaming led by international femocrats such as Helen Derbyshire and local equivalents such as Marian Tackie and Juliana Dennis as well as feminist activists such as Esther Ofei-Aboagye. Ofei-Aboagye and Derbyshire led research and advocacy on mainstreaming gender in Ghana resulting in their edited book Gender Mainstreaming in Ghana of 1999, among others. There were also the Women and Law in Africa research project and Women and Land Projects, which were led by academic and activist researchers from across the continent. The two projects, which were coordinated from the University of Ghana produced research for education and training as well as for policy reforms and programming interventions. The publications, Women and Law in West Africa volumes one and two, Women and Law in Sub-Saharan and Women and Land in West Africa, edited by Akua Kuenyehia, a law professor, gender activist and founder of FIDA, resulted from that process. These initiatives have helped place the UG on a premier path in terms of actions

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to promote GS. It is worth noting however that those early efforts were based on individual drive rather institutional policy and were often backed by donor sources. As Dzodzi Tsikata (n.d.: 1) has explained in a Profile of the Centre for Gender Advocacy and Research (CEGENSA) of the UG:

In Ghana for example, before the 1990s, there were few efforts to institutionalise GWS in the academy. In 1989, the Institute of African Studies, then under the directorship of Professor Kwame Arhin, established the Development and Women’s Studies Programme (DAWS), whose first coordinator was Professor Takyiwaa Manuh. This was the earliest effort to instutiontalise gender and women’s studies at the University of Ghana. Before then, a small group of women faculty had established the Women’s Research Group (WERG) under the leadership of Professor Elizabeth Ardayfio-Schandorf to promote research on gender issues. An important achievement of WERG was the production of an annotated bibliography of GWS publications. DAWS was a more ambitious project, combining curriculum development and research. DAWS started two postgraduate courses within the African studies programme, organized two major international conferences, the first on the state of art of women and gender studies in Ghana and the other on bridging the divide between gender workers in academia, policy-making and in civil society. These and other activities were undertaken with the support of the British Council, which also sponsored faculty links with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

GS in Ghana has also benefited tremendously from initiatives at the global and continental levels especially after the establishment of the AGI in South Africa and UN Gender processes under the Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC)7 and the Committee on the Stats of Women (CSW). Many of its foremost gender scholars and activists had benefited from its research, capacity-building and networking initiatives. Many of them have also benefited from continental processes initiated under the CODESRIA’s Gender Institute and AMwA’s AWLI, as discussed above and remain active members of those platforms and processes.

During each round of the CSW meeting in New York, Ghana’s national gender machinery, now in the form of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP), participates by preparing and submitting a report on the Status of Women in Ghana. The Ministry’s work has often been complemented by the NGO shadow report, often led by the Network for Women’s Rights Ghana (Netright), a coalition of NGOs and individuals in gender equality and women’s rights work. Netright also facilitates a local parallel annually, the Status of Women’s Report, which entails a critical review of global and national events affecting women during the year by a member, which is published periodically. The Report is 7 UN Economic and Social Committee

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presented at its annual end of year event during which distinguished feminist (women and men) achievers at all levels, especially those in the trenches, are celebrated. Netright also publishes the Akoben, a newsletter on GWS in Ghana. As a long standing member and host of the Ghana Social Forum, Netright has coordinated the production of its flagship publication, Social Watch Ghana and contributes chapters on Ghana to Social Watch global, often with strong gender dimensions. Inarguably, Ghana’s core GS scholarship has entailed the interrogation of development in relation to the state’s commitments globally, continentally and nationally with the view to reshape local development (i.e., policies, programmes, projects) by opening it up for not just the mere addition of women in the service of its instrumentalist purposes but also engaging in gender analysis as an exercise for better understanding of social relations and interactions and the ways that they shape and affect human dignity so as to tackle them more effectively. Within Ghana’s higher education institutions (HEIs), it has been only in this millennium that some serious consideration has been given to GS. Even that not much has been achieved in terms of the institution of academic programmes. Indeed, not one such exists among Ghana’s nine public universities. Investigations show that no such exist in our polytechnics.Apart from the UG case, pre-empted above and a few courses scattered in various departments and units through individual rather than institutional initiative, many of our Ghanaian universities do not have long standing GS programmes. A study in 2001 revealed that there were 22 gender courses in UCC and 20 in UG (Tsikata, nd; Manu, Gariba and Budu, 2007). This was progressive at the time as many other HEIs including the University for Development Studies did not have any GS courses at all. There were however independent resources, sensitization workshops, research projects and other capacity building activities by individuals and/or groups within the academy and mostly in collaboration with donors and organizations outside of the academy. The study, which appears to have formed part of a broader initiative to examine the state of GS on the continent, inspired later efforts by the World Bank Gender Institute (WBSI). The WBSI hosted a workshop of heads on Ghanaian universities, including some private ones in 2006, resulting in the so-called Swedru Communique, which committed participating institutions to mainstream gender into their work. This included the establishment of coordinating units, introduction of taught courses/programmes, reformation and/or institution of policies and development of programmes for the sensitization of students and staff on gender issues. The UG was tasked to lead the process of working with other institutions to develop a curriculum that could be taught to all students. After living up to its task of coordinating and developing the said curriculum, many of the institutions have failed to implement it. Indeed, most of what was agreed at Swedru remains to be implemented by majority of the institutions.

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On a rather personal note, let me dze me fie asem, by turning to the University for Development Studies (UDS), where I have worked for over a decade. Indeed, when I joined the UDS in 2002 as a member of faculty, I was scandalized by the fact that as a Development Studies institution, mandated to use scholarship for the socio-economic transformation of communities and people living in deprivation, there was no single course on gender in the entire University. There was no such even in the Faculty of Integrated Development Studies, the only Social Sciences and Humanities focused Faculty at the time. Yet that Faculty’s mandate included the use of a multi-disciplinary and practical-oriented approach to curriculum programming with people and community development. Of course like elsewhere in the country, there were independent gender consultants but none of that robbed off on the University or Faculty. One would have thought that GS would be a priority naturally. But it was not even peripheral let alone central to the community development mandate of the University. The curriculum developers of that time did not consider gender a necessary part of the University’s mandate/agenda. Hence, at the beginning I used almost every platform to make that clear to whoever was willing to listen but failing to get measured policy and programmatic response, I resorted to improvise in my taught courses. At the time, I was teaching in the African Studies programme. Today, UDS has several GS courses with the title Gender and Development ever popular in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes alike. However, there is still no full programme or department for GS. There is one department only, in the Faculty of Agribusiness and Communication Sciences, which includes GS in its name; the Department of Agriculture Economics, Gender Studies and Rural Development. There is also a so-called Gender Unit mushroomed within the Institute for Continuous Education and Interdisciplinary Research. Eventually, when UDS put its Strategic Plan (2003 - 2008) in place it was heart-warming that one of its goals, the third, was to mainstream gender. Efforts to implement that goal by setting up a Gender Unit was short-lived. It lasted only during the shelf life of the strategic plan, although the UDS still upholds the tenets of that Plan. The effort at GS was thwarted and squashed with the arrival of a new pharaoh who did not know or do gender. Pardon the use of Biblical humour. It helps to illustrate the extent of resistance to GS in some of our institutions.

Also, in the University of Education Winneba (UEW), the effort has been championed by a passionate woman in administration, Mrs. Wilhelmina Tete-Mensah, whose success in mobilizing local support has resulted in major institutional responses in the form of policy and structural development. Her efforts has resulted in a strong gender team which facilitates the University’s gender efforts. Currently, UEW has a Gender Unit and Directorate, which have led the process of producing a Gender Policy and Sexual Harassment Policy. The policies were based on research and advocacy. Through a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant, it also established a mentorship programme and educational scholarship for women students and faculty. In terms of taught courses

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and academic programmes, the UEW only has a few courses, largely in departments within the Social Sciences and Humanities. However, Gender Unit has been successful in running training programmes for building staff capacity and currently maintain a core team of staff who champion gender work. In addition, the Unit has conducted research on sexual harassment and curriculum. The UEW probably maintains the most progressive gender mainstreaming programme in all of Ghana.

In the UCC, GS has a much longer history dating to the singular efforts of now Prof. Mansah Prah in the Sociology Department. Joined latter by Prof. Nancy Lungren, her efforts resulted in the introduction of courses and inclusion of gender perspectives in Sociology courses. In addition, the Centre, now Institute of Development Studies, had also promoted GS through courses and research. In like manner, through the effort of Prof. Akua Britwum, graduate courses and research have been introduced and taught. Her work in the sexuality project of AGI and labour studies with the Ghana Trade Union Congress have helped promote GS in UCC. You may recall the study on sexual harassment in Ghanaian universities which today remains an important reference document for anti-violence projects within and beyond the establishment. I am still to read about any study on that subject and of that magnitude on Ghana. The UCC team of GS enthusiasts, have also played the activist role of mobilizing women, staff and wives, into an association which festers gender awareness and women’s empowerment within the UCC community. Efforts to introduce under-wide GS was stalled on claims to operational difficulties. However, the UCC has and operates a gender/sexual harassment policy and has recently established the Centre for Gender Advocacy, Research and Development (CEGRAD), whose structural location remains unclear. CEGRAD remains resolate in its work to promote gender research, advocacy and documentation. It does this through capacity-building workshops, curriculum development, sensitivity trainings, collaborative research and the commemoration of special events. CEGRAD also maintains strong connections with second cycle institutions within its catchment area, which helps promote inter-generational learning and with sister higher institutions and gender programmes.

As already noted, the oldest efforts at institutional GS in Ghanaian HE is the DAWS programme of the IAS in the UG, pointed to above. Today, UG has advanced its efforts to institutionalize GS through the establishment of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA). CEGENSA promotes research and documentation, training and education, curriculum development and advocacy on gender issues. Currently, its Resources and Documentation Unit supports researchers and students locally and beyond. The Centre’s platform for curriculum development and gender resources sharing among sister universities remains an important learning space. CEGENSA has also reviewed the UG’s policies and documents to make them gender sensitive. Its transnational research programmes, Pathways for Women’s Empowerment and Funding Women’s Rights, have generated knowledge, relationships and resources for GS across the

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globe. Its leadership also remain active in the women’s movement within and outside of the University.

Not much information was available for this analysis from other public universities. However, in the case of the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), no formal responses have been made regarding implementing the Swedru Communique. However, independent research and courses exist as championed by some faculty members. In the particular case of the KNUST, courses exists in Sociology and Development Studies programmes while some independent research and activists such as Dr. Rudith King are promoting research and trainings. There is also the Women in Engineering (WINE) programme, which has worked tirelessly to promote women’s fortunes in engineering and related programmes. Today, the WINE initiative thrives and currently operates at the level of the Ghana Institute of Engineers. In the case of the UMaT, a Gender Mainstreaming Policy was introduced in the 2004/2005 to help increase female enrolment into its science and engineering programmes (Nyarko & Eshun (2013). For the two newest Universities, University of Allied Health Sciences (UHAS) and University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR), no information was available on their gender mainstreaming status. Outside of the HEIs, NGOs on women‘s rights and gender equality have become important spaces for gender research, documentation and programming tools. With support from donor partners, they have been involved in generating research to support their advocacy such as the one by the Gender Centre, cited above, which has helped in informing decisions and shaping interventions on violence against women. Many of such NGOs have Research Resources and Documentation Units, which collect, publish and/or avail gender resources as reference materials for scholars and students. They also organize fora for the validation of research and sharing of new research. However, much of their own research has tended to take the form of institutional reviews, programme evaluation and periodic reports as well as policy briefs and advocacy tools and modules. NGO efforts have also produced works such as the Women’s Manifesto of Ghana and the subsequent Women’s Manifesto Coalition, both hosted by Abantu for Development; the Status of Women’s Reports and Social Watch Reports, hosted by Netright and many more, which inform advocacy, programming and policy. NGOs also invest in resources for policy research, many of which are contracted to academic researchers. Notable among them are the Gender and Economic Reforms in Africa (GERA) by the Gender Unit of the Third World Network (TWN) Africa. TWN also initiated and hosted the National Machinery on Women research series. Another NGO, ISODEC through its Centre for Budget Analysis, had championed gender budgeting and produced research and documentation that entailed a multi-sectoral analysis of Ghanaian budgets from gender perspectives.

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Yet, another important arena for GS in Ghana is the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAS) of the Government of Ghana. Since Ghana embraced gender mainstreaming as an approach to gender equality in the late 1990s, established the national machinery for women, the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD) in 1975, and moved on to establish a ministry, the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs in 2001, now the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) in 2013, assigning it a cabinet status, there has been no doubt about state interest in living up to its commitments. However, the commensurate resources, human and financial, have not been forthcoming. The national machinery, no matter its form, has been charged with the responsibility of working with MDAs but also Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAS) to mainstream gender in their work. An important part of that work has been building capacities for implementing gender policies including operationalising, budgeting for and monitoring policy. These initiatives have resulted in various collaborations in research and training. For instance, the Gender Programme of the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS) has collaborated with the gender ministry to design a project and to build capacities for gender planning within decentralized units. This has also resulted in an implementation framework, the Gender Analysis and Planning Template for MMDAs. In addition, resources have been invested in producing research to inform policy and programming. The Ministry also hosts the national gender policy and collaborates with NGOs and MDAs for the development of additional gender policies such as the ongoing initiatives on the Affirmative Action Bill and the Spousal Property Bill.

Taken together, the Ghanaian scene has been vibrant on GS. I will turn next to teasing out what I consider to be the status of GS in Ghana today. WHERE WE ARE IN GHANA

Bridging Policy and Practices

Through the diverse initiatives and collaborations across sectors, organizations and institutions, we have been able to move gender work and for that matter GS into a level of praxis where there is clarity regarding the use of research evidence to build advocacy for policy change and facilitating programming and project interventions. A lot of that happened under the Ghana Research and Advocacy Programme (G-rap) funding support which furthered the generation and use of research for advocacy. Under that initiative gender equality (GE) and women’s rights (WR) NGOs on their own and in collaboration with others produced various researches and trainings such as on Oil and Gas, Economic Justice, Education for All and Maternal and Reproduction Health, among others. These have been used for advocacy but also for policy and teaching. Whether at the level of NGOs or HEIs, research and documentation has become an important part of the effort to promote GE and WR. Much of the work here has taken the form of conducting local research on a range

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of issues that illuminate and serve as the basis for advocacy such as the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre’s Violence against Women studies and publications which brought together academics and activists. Today that product remains a key text in GS classrooms and advocacy platforms. Ghana’s domestic violence legislations, whose development followed similar trend of massive mobilization at various levels, has benefited from such studies and advocacy.

Institutionalization of GS

We have made significant progress in institutionalizing GS as an agenda of change for governmental and non-governmental institutions but not so well in the Academy. Since 1975, the Ghana Government system has maintained a gender outfit that has played an important role in representing GE and WR interests at various levels as well as championing such causes in policy development and implementation. This national machinery, which started as the Council that metamorphosed into a ministry of cabinet status with a Department for Gender wields a cross-cutting mandate to work with all MDAs as well as MMDAs to mainstream gender into their work. This national machinery works also with civil society including NGOs and academia to promote research for policy development and implementation. Much of the work in Academy remains marginalized in the form of courses and independent research. Centres, Units and Departments have been slow in developing. Even for the few emerging ones, there are challenges regarding their location within the administrative hierarchy which remains ambiguous and the shortage in the requisite technical capacities and material resources for fulfilling their cross-cutting mandate of driving institutional change and transformation. Many of these rather weak centres of learning and change, are left to take on the entire responsibility of mainstreaming gender in their institutions and thus absolving entire institutions and their subunits of the broad commitment to gender mainstreaming. Apart from being slow in starting, many of the established units within the academy lack clarity regarding their links to the centres of power alongside the challenge posed regarding the accessing of resources, administrative support and management oversight for their work.

Also, charged with the huge responsibility to mainstream gender into the superstructures of HEIs in which they are located, they are often not given commensurate parallel structural mandate to foster operational effectiveness. For instance, many start as centres, which by definition, must be located within an Institute or Faculty. How does one take on an institution-wide mandate from such a limited location? The appointment of heads for those centres is another. Even when they have been established as directorates, while the heads of parallel entities are accorded titles such as Directors, the heads of such gender outfits have often been

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accorded the lesser title coordinator, a position that has no formal place within the administrative hierarchy of Ghanaian HEIs. Both in the UCC and UDS, this has tended to be the case. In the University of Ghana, the head was rightly accorded the title of a director and placed under a faculty and college, whose dean or provost should decide how university-wide programmes must be run. Related to that is the provision and disbursement of resources for operation of the units. Many have tended to start without budget lines and thus tended to depend on donor funds, which presents its own ambivalences. How do institutions of higher learning commit their programmes to external agencies such as donors? How do Ghanaian universities, which epitomize bureaucracy and hierarchy rationalize the fact that officers of lower standing relate with and drive change in their high places? What has happened to planning and budgeting for change if additional units are created without such planning? At least for UDS, gender work began as part of its institution-wide strategic planning process, yet not with the commensurate budget line.

If the commitment to GM were the mere establishment of weak units with the huge responsibility to mainstream, I am sure the architects would have chosen the more appropriate word minorstream. This would constitute a shift in location with a mandate to remain on the side-lines, the margins, as many GS programmes have tended to be. There will be no need to pretend to mainstream when we opt for minorstream. We could then minorstream the marginalized departments, units or centres by allowing them to do their gender talk while the power centres for policy and programming decision-making and resources distribution stick to their businesses as usual.

Trapped in Antiquated Polemics

Although GS can be said to have made significant progress since it came upstream in the 1970s, it is also the case that not much has been done to transform society and discourse. After over 40 years, we are still parallelized by mental inertia. Our discourses are still trapped in backlash and dualized debates that oppose women and men resulting in one too many unhealthy and unhappy outcomes that continue to sustain gendered politics and policies as well as systems and structures that stall community and national growth. We wallow in rhetoric and diatribes that do not take us far although they gravely affect efforts to discharge the mandate to gender mainstreaming. I have always said that if the gender question were merely about the domestication of men, then, I would forever remain quiet. That space is at least familiar territory where women can re/engineer in their favour. Of course, that is when a woman is not in a violent relationship and can leverage resources. If it were also about cross dressing men and women, then it can be left for queer activism. If it were also about ability, we could also leave it for disability activism. I do not intend to slight or minimize any of these isms which are very dear to the gender cause. As a cross-cutting phenomenon, gender includes all of

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these and more, with implications for GS. However, it cannot be reduced to or counter-posed with any one of them. I render my unqualified apology if I have in any way slighted any of the isms. My point, however, is that our engagement in an unhealthy schism that minimalizes critical gender questions and denude our collective efforts for social change and transformation is unhealthy. The gender question is about human dignity and social wellbeing and affects all whether able or disable, queer or straight, young or old, rich or poor and community or national. It is, above all else, about the wellbeing of the bulk of our people as citizens with rights to a good life but who have been denied that because of our sins of commissions and omissions. Being dismissive and apologetic does not change the situations affecting real lives, women’s lives. These women come from all walks of life and of diverse persuasions with their own idiosyncrasies, which cannot be ignored in the process of justifying and justiciabling gender.

Essentialist Universalism

Remaining essentialized in a time that there is clear evidence pointing to the cross-cutting nature of the gender phenomenon that should compel the use of multi-sectoral and holistic approaches to programming interventions is counter-productive. Many a time, we pretend that there is an essential woman who is victimized and needs to be empowered. Well, in our socio-economic system where we have still not settled the score on the feminization of poverty, it makes sense in anti-poverty programming to target the woman. However, it is also clear that this blanket targeting has not served even the identifiable poor woman optimally. There are rural and urban poor women, to mention a few, each of whose poverty requires its own targeted intervention. There is thus the need for the re/thinking and re/strategizing, on hindsight, based on the evidence that has been made available to us now and must be generated in the future based on what we know now. Indeed, it was worth the while in the 1960s and 1970s to compensate and instrumentalize women and move on. But after several decades of such compensatory and instrumentalist politics with their attendant failure to reach the step change, it is just intuitive to want to consider alternative to employ innovative and different approaches and strategies. The gendered nature of our society is obvious.

There is no need any more to convince anyone that gender is an issue with all the statistics and anecdotes flying around. Indeed, GS has so far done considerably well in producing some evidence. What is needed now is how to use that knowledge to address the gender question. It is important to move into more complex and nuanced analyses of gender hierarchies and the forces and factors shaping them in ways that can transform the current situation. At least we can move from a Meadian notion of the farm woman committed only to supporting her husband to a Boserupian analysis of the multiple locations of women in the economy who do not only complement and supplement male actors but are only

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actively engaging and playing critical core roles in the family unit and production system. We should learn from Moser’s triple role analysis to engage women as reproductive but also productive and community actors. Hence, any analysis on women and about gender should learn from these useful lessons. Above all, we need to approach GS from an intersectional perspective so as to open opportunities for understanding the differing realities of women and their differential experiencing of situations over time and space but especially as they relate with men and live in society.

The Staying Women Studies Focus

We have also not been able to migrate from Women’s Studies into real GS. That switch should facilitate a focus not only on relational, structural and systemic analyses but also open GS up to Men’s Studies, Masculinity Studies, Sexuality Studies and Queer studies. Many a time, even when we start out to study or teach GS, we end up studying or teaching Women’s Studies. Apart from southern Africa, where Men’s Studies and Masculinity Studies but also Sexuality Studies and Queer Studies, have come on-stream strongly and are producing useful lessons for influencing policy and programmes, in the most of Africa, particularly Ghana, GS remains Women’s Studies focused. Even when we are analysing gender relations, we tend to do so from Women Studies. In fact, when my students in my gender courses, have challenged that tendency in my classes and research, I have merely thrown it back to them. Failing to correct my sins and even weakly claiming my place in Women’s Studies, I have asked my students to change their focus. Indeed, not a single of them, often male students, have been able to do. I have often thought that none had been bold and brave enough to engage in Men’s Studies or Masculinist Studies. But how could my students possibly enter into Men’s Studies and Masculinist Studies when all I have done is serve them with Women’s Studies? We all pretend it is only women who need to be studied and empowered when we know too well, at least since the introduction of the Gender and Development model, that gender is relational. How can we change a relationship between two entities if all we know is one side of the story, the women’s story? Some time ago, I took interest in a televised men’s series, Mbarima e shia, just so I could hear men speak from their perspective, about men and masculinities. After a number of tune-ins, I got bored with stories of women’s conquest, what women like and not like, as if they knew women better than women themselves. The thing about speaking for another is the obvious disconnect from reality. But then in the mainstream scheme men represent all, ironically. In this effort to gender mainstream, there is the tendency is to speak for and that must be checked. It is important for male gender activists to support Women’s Studies but it is critical for them to take on gender from their perspectives. In the spirit of solidarity, women could support with their experience of telling their stories. Men’s Studies should help us understand how society re/constructs roles to return the responsibilities and expectations of men while Masculinity Studies should enable us to

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understand how the politics of masculinity position men against women and result in their superordinate and privileged social location and its implications for men and society.

Lack of Hard Evidence

We cannot opt to engage in hard politics with only soft evidence. No doubt we need the anecdotes and stories. We need the case studies, biographies and histories. These have served us well in contextualising and embodying discourse. These approaches have aided us to bring the marked and outcast bodies back into discourse and its analysis. They have helped change history, sociology and even science as we have known them; without souls and spirit. Now that we have the bodies back in, to where they truly belong, we need to find ways to keep them in there. We need to find alternatives that embody the soul and spirit not only in shells but keep them animated and enlivened to pursue their cause of social change and transformation. To be able to do so effectively we need to infuse those stories with not only statistical data but also engage in critical analyses that draw from multiple disciplines. After all, what is different? What is different from telling a man’s story, men’s studies; telling a woman’s story, women’s studies and telling them together; men and women’s studies? I will tell you what! The difference has always been in the participant bias and disembodiment of knowledge. If we can be participant inclusive and embody knowledge, we can also engender our studies so they can breathe easy. We will have to disaggregate data and analysis and use grand scheme surveys and experiments to drive home our points to sceptics of that tradition. Above all, we need to employ innovative research tools and techniques to generate data and evidence that would allow for the multi-layered analyses of gender issues.

Developmentalism Persuasions

Undoubtedly, developmentalism has served and still serves the GS cause so well in spite of all the backlash. It has enabled us to get attention and to do very important foundational, ground breaking work but we cannot remain in that space for too long. Now that we have opportunity and attention, I think we should make the most use of it but spreading far and wide to the full remits of GS cause. We need to continue to strength the works in education, health, politics and decision-making. We still can support service delivery and policy advocacy. However, we cannot continue to do that till Godot returns. We have waited long enough. We need to return to critical discourse as the forebears had done by utilizing the resources and tools that are available now to engage in social criticism that pushes the boundaries of positivist instrumentalist analysis of development and promises and failures as well as situate that within society, its traditions, institutions, believes and structures in order to understand how systemic and structural gendering occurs and persists.

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By so doing, we can arrive the tools and strategies to tackling and resolving the persistent gender questions, which appear to defy closure.

Industrialization of Gender Politics

Due to its attractions to donor funding especially in the 1980s and 1990s, many were those who jumped unto the bandwagon, took leisure rides, without taking time to understand its questions, and for that matter, challenges and causes. Out of political expediency and economic urgency, some agenda have been pushed that have not helped in overturning the discourse. Like its bearer, it has been easy to take and create shortcuts so as to entrench and sustain not just ourselves but also the debate while build our livelihoods around them. As so eloquently suggested in Kwesi Pratt Jnr’s criticism of the peace movement as an industry run by entrepreneurs, the seeming industrialization of GS is contributing to the creation of gender entrepreneurs who lack the commitment and politics for driving social change and transformation. Such gender entrepreneurs appear to have found sources of employment whose continued existence is to their personal parochial interest of livelihoods sustainability. Such entrepreneurs who are loud in their advocacy for women’s rights and gender equality and oftentimes claim to empower women, unfortunately tend not to exhibit such commitments in their workplaces or homes. The change that they purport to stand and work for does not reflect in their relationships at home and/or work. Rather it is only in the target community and society that they find expression. They choose the path of work as usual when what it takes is a radical political change at the institutional, personal and communal level. I was mortified when an NGO, which had spent several years working in witch camps distributing food stamps and lobbying traditional leaders opposed efforts to disband those camps. I mean, how long must we continue to lobby while a “pre-historic” practice continues to dehumanize women and indignify their lives? These gender entrepreneurs do not only deceive but also are hypocritical in their approach and outlook. For, their commitments last as long as there are resources of any kind available. Indeed, they tend not to have any clear agenda or mandate regarding. Having originated from activism and advanced by developmentalism, GS has assumed a political and disciplinary position that its champions must exhibit at all times.

Traditionalist apologetics

GS has also lost pretty much its steam of advocating for social transformation. In my mind the only way that we can bring down gender hierarchies is to uproot its foundations and restore an egalitarian system where women and girls like men and boys can live violent-free and dignifying lives. Yet, such suggestions have been met with very unsavoury and sometimes violent reactions in the name of tradition, many times are misconceptions and romanticization that are very far from the truth. Those who push a transformative agenda have been met with labels such as old maidens, bitter widows and rabid feminist who promote anti-

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Africanist and imperialist agenda. What really is traditional and how might one recognise one? Is it possible to imagine traditions as the accepted norms built on the experiences of people over time? If we can move our schools and children from homes and families to town squares and state, although some have not quite reached there yet and remain under trees, why can’t we do same with gender relations by considering alternatives that include girls in the public schools and give them same opportunities as boys? After all we all agree that gender is a social construction, GS studies drive us to this new realization and not compromise its agenda by dwelling in apologetics.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

Build Strong Feminist Institutions

This might be a controversial and perhaps unrealistic expectation because of the negativism that engulfs feminism. However, it does not have to be so if we truly understand feminism as an ideology. I like to cite Ama Atta Aidoo on this. In a televised interview on Hard Talk, she was asked, are you a feminist? She had the most inspiring answer which I am unable to repeat but can paraphrase. She said: Feminism is only an ideology like Marxism and Liberalism. Why not? Indeed, it is the ideology that women’s experiences matter and that a radical change in women’s situation would liberate society and put it on the path of progress. Clearly, you do not have to be a woman to be a feminist. It is an ideological position like Marxism and liberalism, feminism is only an ideology. Those who uphold feminism believe that change can happen only if women’s situation is radically changed and only if women’s experiences matter in discourse and social relationships.

Promote Activist Scholarship

GS has to be properly situated, especially for those of us in the Academy, as something which compels us to at once play the dual role of activism and scholarship. We cannot chose to be only scholars in a field, where our products have direct impact on the lives of people with benefits on society. It is important for us to show, in the least, to those who use our scholarly productions, how to use them but best if we can lead or participate in the process of implementing them. Whether it be teaching students in a lecturer hall, facilitating a workshop on mainstreaming gender in the workplace, conducting social research with a gender sense or giving a public lecturer on women’s work burdens you do not only incite thought but also compel people to think about their own situations. The woman who decides, after your workshop, to ask her husband to help with the household chores or discusses her household’s welfare with her husband or even asks questions in her attempt to participate in decision-making within her household has made a bold decision to change her situation and that is what GS is about. It is just honourable to stay connected to that course by keeping an active presence in the struggle.

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Sojourner Truth laid out her experiences and life-story at the Akron Women’s convention as not a mere public speaker but someone in the trenches. We cannot as academics stay out of it, just as practitioners cannot close themselves off the intellectual debates that should inform their practice. Whether it be developing a strategy for gender budgeting as has been done by the ILGS under the leadership of Dr. Esther Ofei-Aboagye or picketing with Tema Stations traders in solidarity with them in their demand for an alternative marketplace after the Tema Metropolitan Assembly had thrown them out of their posts as has been the case of Netright, one is actively affecting people’s lives and that is what GS stands for. Indeed, as convener of Netright, then Dr. Dzodzi Tsikata, mobilized some of its member organizations to reject funding from the Ghana Advocacy and Research Programme (G-rap) for the way they were treated. In the end the G-rap sat up and revised its policies. Also, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her response to Burke’s distasteful position on women’s education, she did so a scholar-activist who had the power of the pen to contribute to the shaping of discourse. By so doing, she started a discussion on not just Burke’s unsavoury proposals but also inspired discourse that served to deepen and broaden the politically charged social space resulting in the critical discourses that emerged within the context of the then revolutionalizing Europe. She made a move to protest and it spiralled endlessly. Conduct Transdisciplinary Studies

There is no doubt that GS has become a legitimate area of study with its own tools, theories, methods and epistemologies of engagement. As part of that process, it has been demonstrated time without number that as an area of study emerging out of a cross-cutting phenomenon, it should be studied as such. There is no doubt that its beginnings were fraught with several and diverse identity politics that were paralleled with ambivalences and even conflicts in its search for space within the Academy. However, that has long been settled resulting in some the emergence of interdisciplinarity and multi-disciplinary approaches and methodology as favourable alternatives for tackling GS. While these are great and worthy of celebration, it is also the case that they have tended to focus on the methodologies of the diverse disciplines that come together and not necessarily the issues. Having travelled this far, it is important to get innovative by adopting transdisciplinary approaches in GS.

Pohl and Hadorn (2007: 16) explain that “transdisciplinarity is the expansion of the interdisciplinary approaches towards participation. It is a way of achieving innovative goals, enriched understanding and s synergy of new methods. Transdisciplinarity is an integrated vision that disciplinary knowledge in order to solve a problem.” Indeed, it is the problem or issue that should be core to the scholarship on gender and not the methods and theories as academics appear to find appealing. GS should be devoted to tackling the life-worlds of people and how the social

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constructions of those life-worlds are returning violence, marginalizations and disadvantage. Hence, we need tools and strategies of research and education that allow us to tackle the issue or problem; that is the added value for approaching GS from a transdiciplinary perspective.

Also, as Awindor (2015: 109) teaches, the value of transdisciplinarity lies in its ability to “transcend the other disciples by focusing on world life problems, integrating other disciplinary paradigms, engaging in participatory research and the search for unity in the various bodies of knowledge, among others.” Within higher education, many of the centres, units, departments and institutes working for gender justice have been located in academic spaces with their restrictions which limit the extents of GS. For GS within CSOs, the limitations have been instanced by funding agencies and socio-economic regimes and settings. These constrictions and many others should compel the embrace of transdiciplinary approaches as a way to overcome the physical boundaries and especially enrich our perspectives on the issues of interest. Rather than spend time searching for it sites of belonging and limits, a transdisciplinary approach will focus attention on the issue and problem; its sociology, history and politics as well it is policy and programmatic contexts without the unnecessary worry of boundaries.

Transdiciplinary approaches to GS also allows us to be effective in our politics and liberatory in our agenda. It allows us to adopt methods and use tools that are ethical and empowering. These should be inclusive and participatory. Our theories, methods and ethics must be those that dignify and humanize the bodies involved in and are affected by our politics during research, instructions and activism.

Last but not the least, transdisciplinary studies enables us to approach GS from an intersectional platform where there is the recognition of the multiple layering and the colorations as women and men. Why engage in the gimmicks of so-womanish and not-so-womanish or so-manish and not-so-manish when we can actually make that part of our research, instruction and activism. By so doing, we can learn off-hand about the subjective positioning of women and girls as well as men and boys so us to appreciate and rethink of norms and practices shaping their locations.

Mobilize Resources for Strengthening and Enriching GS

Resources, human and material, remain critical to the promotion of GS in Academia, development practice and community. Building human capacities for research, training and management of GS is critical as we move into the next wave. The upcoming wave requires critical and innovative analyses and evidence for driving change consistently and strategically toward transformation. We cannot afford to rely on gender entrepreneurs but also connoisseurs and strategists who can bring and promote creativity and innovation to GS. We need not just specialists but also seasoned practitioners who can provide expert policy and

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programming advice as well as lead in the training and education and, research and documentation. With high levels of technical capacities and informed, strategic leadership, the complimentary material resources will be critical for driving the process. We need well defined structures and systems as well as the physical spaces, literature, technologies and equipment for working consistently toward change. The Ghanaian state, universities, donor partners and CSOs should invest in developing resources for such change to occur. GS focused institutions should also be proactive in demanding and mobilizing such resources for promoting and deepening their work.

Demystify ambiguities in GS Work

We cannot remain ambiguous in our commitments to GS. In fact, so far, we have made significant progress in our efforts to clarify the place and urgency of GS. Thus, suggesting that there cannot be ambiguity in what we seek and how GS must be positioned and driven. Undoubtedly, ambiguities had been created to cripple rather than promote GS. If we are to make effective progress, moving forward, we should strip ourselves, our thinking and our activities of backward thinking by taking forward-looking steps that can advance the work of GS. Within HEIs, in particular, it is important that we clarify the location of GS programmes and the structures and systems mandated to coordinate and facilitate them in order to free them of the paralysis that often grips and keep practitioners morbid when they should be seen actively driving change and progress.

CONCLUSION

Drawing from personal and programming experience, historical documentations and analytical sources, I have examined the various framings of GS to show that it embraces multiple meanings as ‘discipline,’ research, programmes and discourse. I have also engaged in a historical and reflective analysis of the evolution of GCS at three levels; global, continental and local/national to reveal that GS has a long discursive tradition that has been borne out of activism and scholarship. I have shown in particular that GS in all its forms is quite new in Ghana and has been driven on a developmentalist platform but has also engaged academic interests but also civil society, donor and state interests and actions. I have shown that GS within higher education was given legitimation by the Swedru Communiqué. However, not all HEIs have lived to the commitments of that accord. Some like UEW and UG have taken great strides in interpreting and implementing the Communique while others such as KNUST and UMAT have been slow. Yet, others like UDS and UCC has made considerable progress in their effort to implement it.

Specifically, on where we are, there is also a mix bag. The foregone analyses reveal that insofar as GS in Ghana is concerned currently we at the juncture of bridging policy and practice gaps, institutionalizing GS, being trapped in antiquated polemics, focused on essentialized

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universalism, persist in promoting Women’s Studies at the expense of other forms of GS, still lack hard core evidence, remain developmentalist in our persuasion, and still have to contend with traditionalistic apologetics.

Hence, it has been suggested that shift a shift is made toward building strong feminist institutions, promoting activist scholarship, adopting transdisciplinary approaches, strengthening our resources mobilization and demystifying the ambiguities that continue to draw back GS work.

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