Locating Resistance within Socio-Cultural Gendered Norms of Subordination: Female Teacher Educators’ Lived Experiences in Uganda

• In Event: Justice, Social movements, and Protest in/through Education

Proposal

Introduction
The breadth of studies on women’s agency and/or resistance is extensive (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Sensoy & Marshall, 2010). These studies have challenged Western feminist scholarship, which, having analysed agency from a Western perspective then portrays non-Western women as victims. Moreover, such studies have largely focused on Middle Eastern contexts, within the realm of religion and/or Islam. While some feminist scholars have focused on African women’s agency, it is within the African American and/or South African context (Collins, 2000; Hooks, 2012), with a focus race or “exotic” cultural practices in sub-Saharan Africa (LaTosky, 2015; Longman & Bradley, 2015). Although these studies illuminate how women navigate patriarchal socio-cultural structures, their focus on exotic rather than “regular” and/or “every day” non-Western lives, exoticizes these bodies, essentially otherising them, and, reinstating power relations in which the “other” becomes a study site for Western bodies. Further, while some studies, specifically about Ugandan women disturb the monolithic victim narrative (Bantebya & Keniston, 2006; Decker, 2014), they do not carve out the women’s agentic scripts. This leaves liberal humanist notions of agency, which have been used to re-inscribe the victim narrative unexamined and/or intact.

In taking up this study on non-Western, specifically Ugandan women’s trajectories, this paper provides insights into women’s lived and/or “regular” day-to-day experiences. This approach disrupted monolithic constructions of non-Western women, while also showing intersections and disparities between them and Western women. In focusing on moments of resistance within the women’s gendered lived experiences, I operationalized resistance as drawn from the Foucauldian tradition.

Foucauldian tradition of resistance
Foucault explained that resistance exists in all power relations, as well articulated in his oft-cited statement, “Where there is power, there is resistance”(1978, p. 93). He added that “As soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by power: We can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy” (1988, p. 123). Resistance as such is that which evades power, threatening and/or weakening its diffusion. Resistance is what threatens power, hence it stands against power as an adversary. In arguing that there are diverse points of resistance within the web of power, Foucault distances himself from defining limits to resistance as such limits could foreclose various opportunities of protest. He argued that there are points of resistance suffused within the power network and as such, “there is no single locus of great refusal…Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96). This suggests an endorsement of all forms of opposition and/or protest, supporting a wide range of political actions. This theoretical perspective provided a lens for making sense of non-normative resistance as deployed by the Ugandan women in navigating power within their socio-cultural context to realise their potential.

Research questions
The study is guided by the following research questions:
i) What stories do female teacher educators in a Ugandan university narrate to demonstrate their gendered lived experiences?
ii) How are gendered relations of domination and subordination reproduced and resisted in existing socio-cultural forms of interaction?

Methodology
I made use of a qualitative phenomenological research design to elicit female teacher educators’ gendered lived experiences, within one of the universities in Uganda. In-depth interviews elicited the participants’ stories while journal entries elicited my own experiences, which I interweaved with the participants’ experiences. The analysis of the data was informed by feminist post structural discourse analysis and, reflexivity was threaded in, to ensure trustworthiness and credibility of the data.

Findings
The stories on women’s lived experiences illuminated the ways in which they found non-normative spaces to elude power, thereby deploying non-conventional forms of resistance to shape their reality. The study elicited seven scripts taken up by the women to elude power, namely: partaking of power in academia; trudging on in silence amidst the storm; embracing education to espouse them; disturbing the marriage-above-all-else-script; crossing gender boundaries; pushing back in male dominated spaces as well as repudiating sexualisation at the work place work place.

Conclusion
This focus on agency within conditions of subjugation does not lose sight of women’s marginalization, but goes beyond the pervasive victimhood narrative, to consider their socio-cultural and political expressions of resistance as spaces of politics and learning. Therefore the study disrupted and complicated the pervasive victim narrative that dominantly produces women in the global South, illuminating the complexity and diversity in protest and/or resistance.

Author

• Lydia Namatende-Sakwa, African Population and Health Reserach Center, Nairobi