INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL INQUIRIES (IJOCIN)

This paper entitled, ‘The Postfeminist “blame narrative”: Implications for Feminism in Africa’, is a reaction to the backwardness of the feminist struggle in Africa. The Postfeminist ‘blame narrative’ attributes women’s inequalities or failures basically to their own individual choices, attitudes, or behaviours rather than to structural gender discrimination or patriarchal institutions. The work has as its aim, the strengthening of feminist struggle in the continent. Using the qualitative method of research, postfeminism and its “blame narrative” are exposed and analyzed. It is highlighted that postfeminism, unlike anti-feminism, accepts feminism in all ramifications but points to the fact that second wave feminism promoting liberal feminism, fails to adequately address the focal issues of feminist struggle. The “blame narrative” targets mainly the focus on gender equality which according to postfeminists addresses only liberal equality thereby heightening the problem of gender inequality. Like the radical feminists, postfeminists canvas for more proactive feminist approaches for addressing feminist issues in the contemporary society. Focal among such issues are the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI), which bothers on not only inequality, but also gender differences. In addressing the implications of the “postfeminist narrative” for feminism in Africa, this paper notes that it is a call for African feminists to awaken to the demands of feminist struggle by going beyond second wave feminism to embrace other waves of feminism. It implies that feminism in Africa has been backward because it still anchors on liberal feminism, and therefore needs to traverse that scenario. However, this paper acknowledges that unlike Western Feminists, African feminists need not jettison liberal feminism which is still needed to increase awareness of feminist struggle among classes of people in Africa, for example, the uneducated. What the paper advocates is the amalgamation of all possible approaches to feminism, Western and African, for effective feminism in Africa.

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