"A Conspiracy of Women: Institutions, Humour and Imagination"
6th African Feminisms (Afems) Conference, 9-11 July 2025, Nelson Mandela University,
Gqeberha, South Africa
Abstract deadline: 20 April 2025
Abstracts to be emailed to: WomenAndGenderStudies@mandela.ac.za

In the essay whose title inspires this year’s conference theme, Shireen Hassim links moments of
crisis and indeterminacy with opportunities for new registers of imagination and feminist strategy,
feminism’s (in)stability within African women’s movements notwithstanding. Fusing the
experimental and the transformative, the humorous and the risk-embracing, Hassim writes
compellingly of specificity whilst also troubling the boundaries of definition.
We note a linked project in Naminata Diabate’s Naked Agency, which unsettles the interpretative
lenses brought to bear on a variety of embodied political performances often conflated under
“naked protest”. Where Hassim zooms in on feminism’s capacity to exceed nationalism, Diabate
traces how an adaptive form of women’s political articulation takes on different meanings in
altered geographical settings, from “radical disrobing” to “genital cursing”. Polo Moji’s
deployment of “walking as method” in her reading of Afropean women’s imaginative praxes as
space altering is another ingenious contribution to the meeting places of creativity, disciplinary
inheritance and freedom. Read together, such African feminists inventiveness cautions against the
kinds of hasty (mis)recognitions that Grace Musila calls “epistemic disarticulations”: replications
of opacities about African creative and experimental life worlds. In its place, they bestow on us
generative African feminist conceptual and theoretical alphabets.

We share curiosity about how to consistently access African feminist creative narratives of
possibility, agentic formulations, and experimentation, with Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-
Alazard.
 

Continuing with jettisoning such rigid frameworks as producing “same disaster, different societal
demands” for African women’s intellectual work, to use Abosede Ipadeola’s formulation, how
might we amplify these ambling, multi-modal African feminist questions and experiments?
 

We welcome the methodologically innovation with which African feminist scholars approach the
meeting places of transgressive gender performance, contemporary politics, joy, rumour and
humour in the work of African artists like Anne Kansiime, the “African queen of comedy”, or Celeste
Ntuli’s fearless and unapologetic destabilisation of hegemonic gender and celebration of
transgressive femininities, especially those associated with economically marginal Black women in
southern Africa, or even satirist and writer, Coconut Kelz's discomfiting frames.
 

The hosts of the sixth African Feminisms (Afems) Conference, the SARChI Chair in African
Feminist Imagination (AfemI) and the Centre for Women and Gender Studies (CWGS) at Nelson
Mandela University invite abstracts and panel proposals on the following thematic areas:
* Voices, hierarchies and spaces
* Memory and experiments
* Violence, the female fear factory and feminist fury
* Escape theories: spaces of becoming
* Popular imaginaries, good time girls and difficult women
* Archives of the imagination
* Rumour, humour and unruliness
* African maternal legacies and temporality
* Institutions and gender equality
* Masquerading strategies in art
* Fictions and African feminist pasts
* Hijabs and hymens, ovaries and rosaries
 

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References
Arndt, Susan, and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard. 2017. “On FutureS, or: The Future Is On.” Journal of
the African Literature Association 11, no 1 (2017): 1-2.
Arndt, Susan, and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, eds. Narrating African FutureS: In(ter)ventions and
Agencies in African and African Diasporic Fiction (London: Routledge, 2020.)
Diabate, Naminata. Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2020)
Hassim, Shireen. “A Conspiracy of Women: The Women’s Movement in South Africa’s Transition
to Democracy.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2002): 693-732.
Hassim Shireen. Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)
Ipadeola, Abosede Priscilla. Feminist African Philosophy: Women and the Politics of Difference
(London: Routledge, 2023)
Moji, Polo. Gender and Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (London:
Routledge, 2022)
Musila, Grace A. “Navigating Epistemic Disarticulations.” African Affairs 116, no. 465 (2017):
692-704.