Reconceptualizing Gender: Critical Investigations into assumptions of 'modernity'

With a focus on conceptualizations and with a point of departure in the author’s confrontation in northern Mozambique in the early 1980s with local women’s refusal to acknowledge the proclaimed advantages for women of the newly independent Mozambican state’s move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’, the paper proceeds to investigate the European historical background for tradition/modernity assumptions regarding women and gender. The investigation is informed by Marxist, feminist and decolonial critical rewritings of European history, including conceptions of gender which developed along the way, significantly in terms of hierarchical dichotomies of male dominance/female subordination. A critical re-reading of feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex shows, how de Beauvoir’s visions of ‘gender equality’ are also limited by this kind of thinking. The paper further points to the ways in which, from post World War II onwards with institutions such as the World Bank and UN, these European/Western conceptions were imposed on gender relations on a global scale. On this background different types of decolonial lines of thinking regarding gender are presented, lines of thinking which go beyond gender dichotomies and hierarchies, while embracing conceptions of motherhood and of human interconnectedness, as expressed in the African notion of Ubuntu.