‘Mary Amaka’ Feminism: Exploring the underside of pop-cultured ‘global women empowerment’

Abstract

Until recently, conventional discourses on global inequality and justice have been inundated with what can be called the narrative of the ‘global women’s rights issues’ industry. Interpersonal themes dominate the global social mission in an almost exclusive focus on alleged remnants of colonized cultures’ ‘bad cultural practices’ – e.g. ‘rape’, ‘forced marriages’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘FGM’, ‘honour killing’. Moreover, these widely accepted cultural judgements are deployed mainly on the basis of the ‘universal values’ of ‘solidarity’, ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘liberty’ – all slogans of Western ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy. There is a genealogy of geohistorical forces (that mirror key trends in the modern/colonial matrix of power) that must be considered if we are to understand the ascendancy of the ‘global womanhood’ discourses and the institutional frameworks of reasoning upon which they rely. This article traces this genealogy, presenting an onto-epistemological critique of humanitarian imperialism that proceeds under the guise of ‘global women’s human rights issues’.