Description
Book SynopsisThe Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers.
Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the
Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – responded to challenges of increased labour precarity and additional care-work. The book critiques neoliberal feminism, which has overshadowed the experiences of feminist grassroots resistance. Instead, the academics and activists in this volume call to action a new wave feminism that is responsive to socio-ecological and economic exploitation, and the oppression of both women and the environment within the patriarchal capitalist system.
Offering a diverse range of approaches to this topic, contributions range from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, championing climate justice in mining-affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. These practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered here is a focus on subaltern women’s grassroots resistance that advances and enables solidarity-based political projects, deepens democracy, and builds capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Introduction – Vishwas Satgar and Ruth Ntlokotse
- PART I: Indigenous Emancipatory Feminism and Transformative Resistance
- Chapter 1 Extractivism and Crises: Rooting Development Alternatives in Emancipatory African Socialist Eco-feminism – Samantha Hargreaves
- Chapter 2 Jineology and the Pandemic: Rojava’s Alternative Anti-Capitalist-Statist Model – Hawzhin Azeez
- PART II: Ecology and Transformative Women’s Power in South Africa
- Chapter 3 Doing ecofeminism in a time of Covid-19: Beyond the limits of liberal feminism – Inge Konik
- Chapter 4 ‘Our Existence is Resistance’: Women Challenging Mining and the Climate Crisis in a time of Covid-19 – Dineo Skosana and Jacklyn Cock
- Chapter 5 Women and Food Sovereignty: Tackling Hunger during Covid-19 – Courtney Morgan and Jane Cherry
- PART III: Economic Transformation, Public Services and Transformative Women’s Power in South Africa
- Chapter 6 Quiet Rebels: Underground Women Miners and Refusal as Resistance – Asanda Benya
- Chapter 7 Class, Social Mobility and African Women in South Africa – Jane Mbithi-Dikgole
- Chapter 8 Government’s Covid-19 Fiscal Responses and the Crisis of Social Reproduction – Sonia Phalatse and Busi Sibeko
- Chapter 9 Nursing and the Crisis of Social Reproduction - Before and During Covid-19 – Christine Bischoff
- PART IV: Where to for Emancipatory Feminism?
- Chapter 10 Crises, Socio-Ecological Reproduction and Intersectionality: Challenges for Emancipatory Feminism – Vishwas Satgar
- Conclusion: Ruth Ntlokotse and Vishwas Satgar
- Contributors
- Index
