Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa
Editor: Amanda Gouws

(Un)thinking Citizenship brings new perspectives and insights about women’s lived experience to the body of existing literature on citizenship. It stimulates debate on issues of citizenship and includes perspectives on poverty, HIV/AIDS, political representation and violence against women. While books with a feminist perspective on different aspects of politics such as rights, voting behaviour, representation, and policy making have appeared, very few deal explicitly with theory. This book aims to make a contribution to theory building at the same time as incorporating empirical evidence.
The text is written in an accessible style so that practitioners, students and politicians may find it useful. Scholars from different disciplines such as political science, law, philosophy, geography and gender studies as well as the voices of activists have been included.

(Un)thinking Citizenship is a view from the South, from a developing democracy that is to a large extent viewed as one of the great success stories of democratic transitions.

This new text boasts a cast of some of South Africa’s strongest feminist academics across a spectrum of disciplines. Based on rigorous scholarship and informed by cutting edge theories and debates on gender and citizenship, this impressive collection is warmly welcomed in the still marginalised arena of feminist knowledge production and the continued under-representation of women’s voices in academic publishing. A critically reflective text of this nature is certainly timely as we near the end of the first decade of democracy.

– Tammy Shefer, Director/Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape

Amanda Gouws is professor of political science at the University of Stellenbosch. She has been involved in numerous survey research projects in South Africa and has published articles on political tolerance, the electoral system, and gender politics in South Africa.