Peppering Patriarchy: Re-imagining/Re-making Femaleness in Ghana through Social Media

As part of an ongoing series looking at the #MeToo movement and humanitarianism in Africa, today Titilope F. Ajayi builds on Nora Darko’s piece (posted here for those who missed it!) discussing new feminism(s) in Africa, specifically in the context of Ghana. She asks if new feminist groups like Pepper Dem Ministries (PDM) signal the onset of an arguably fourth or new wave of feminism in Ghana. In what ways is this activism attempting to make new meanings of femininity in Ghana? What feminine subjectivities are being produced and what does all this portend for the future of femaleness and women’s organising in Ghana?

Peppering Patriarchy: Re-imagining/Re-making Femaleness in Ghana through Social Media

By: Titilope F. Ajayi, University of Ghana – Legon

African women have a long history of pre-feminism organising (Mama 2005), including around gendered social injustices that dehumanise women and femaleness and the ideologies that enable them (Mama 2004, 2005; Steady 2006, 2011; Adomako Ampofo 2008; Salo 2011, Tsikata 2009; Nnaemeka 2003; Hassim 2002). The literature on African women’s organizing also shows that the ‘presence’ of women-in-movement has not necessarily meant that they are ‘feminist’-oriented (read: seeking transformations in structural gendered inequalities) (Rowbotham 1992 in Molyneux 1998; Mama 1994, 2005, 2011; Horn 2013). Indeed, several African women’s mobilisations do not identify as feminist (Mama 2005, 2011; Bouilly, Rillon & Cross 2016). Much feminine resistance has hitherto addressed what I term the structures or manifestations or symptoms of sexism (The Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004). But across Africa today, young African feminists are extending this process by attacking sexism at its root through questioning anew what it means to be female on the continent (Mama 2005, Tripp 2017) in ways that seek to subvert the misogynistic mindsets that uphold gender inequalities. In addition to the ‘traditional’ modality of organized ‘offline’ protest, these women are compelling re-imaginations of notions and performances of femininity in diverse creative ways.

In Ghana, Pepper Dem Ministries (PDM), a feminist social activism led by young Ghanaian women, is using social-digital media to challenge what it calls ‘toxic gender narratives’ in Ghana, in and against a global context marked by two significant happenings: rising misogyny is increasingly being questioned—note the recent explosion of harassment allegations in the entertainment industry that revived the #MeToo movement—and some scholars are remarking an undoing of ‘traditional’ feminist politics (McRobbie 2009 in Baer 2016; Dosekun 2015). Does PDM signal the onset of another, arguably fourth or new wave of feminism in Ghana? In what ways is this activism attempting to make new meanings of femininity in Ghana? What feminine subjectivities are being produced? How does PDM’s use of social-digital media mediate this process? What does all this portend for the future of femaleness and women’s organising in Ghana?

Ghana’s is a context in which female is still largely subordinated to male with a constant gender socialization beginning from infancy and rigid gender roles that discourage and discipline deviance. Arguably because this situation prevails despite decades of women’s organising or resistance in different political dispensations in Ghana (Prah 2004), the emergence of activisms like PDM is undoing or/and re-doing feminism in ways that have not been adequately studied and theorised in non-Western contexts (Dosekun 2015). Yet despite a disparity in framings of new/post-/fourth-wave feminisms in feminist literature, PDM embodies some suggested characteristics: it is imagined as young and humorous (Boler 2012), digital (Rivers 2017), and more aggressive and more potentially culturally and generationally cohesive than previous feminisms (Lawrence 2015, Rivers 2014). In light of this and of a discernible shift roughly every 20 years in perceptions and performances of feminism in Ghana, I argue that PDM symbolises the onset of a new ‘postcolonial’ femininity and feminist politics in the country but also transnationally across Africa and the rest of the world.

In its members’ words, PDM is “a group of charismatic young women with their male allies putting gender on everybody’s agenda” (Pepper Dem Ministries 2017). All seven women are Ghanaian and appear to range in age from late 20s to early 40s. All of them are tertiary educated—two to PhD level at American universities, in formal employment, and some of them live and work abroad. Most of them appear to be unmarried—a fact that features in stereotyped monolithic representations of them as ‘embittered man-hating lesbian women’. The apparent level of cultural homogeneity among these women may be at the root of their foregrounding of the gendered concerns of essentially middle-class women like themselves living primarily in urban Accra. I will be interrogating, as directed by comments received at #ASA2017, the intersections between PDM and the larger, older, more established women’s movement in Ghana which was the subject of discussion at an intergenerational feminist dialogue in Accra on International Women’s Day 2018.[i] I write about the dialogue in a separate post but it is noteworthy that a group that emerged with no visible connections to Ghana’s feminist history engaged at least two other generations in frank conversation that laid bare the many facets of Ghanaian womanhood as well as the symmetries, disjunctures, gaps and opportunities for pan-generational feminist organising in Ghana.

According to PDM: “The purpose of our probing, interrogating, and theorizing is to facilitate learning, unlearning and re-learning of the narratives both male and females have been operating by, in order to establish a better approach to our socialization. The issues we technically address are certain ingrained gender norms and how partial it can be against women,” (Pepper Dem Ministries 2017). Though they claim to have been active for some time, two social incidents in Ghana prompted their emergence on the public scene in September 2017. Firstly, in a public fallout between male journalists Paul Adom Otchere and Manasseh Azure, Otchere made a querulous reference to Azure’s wife in a public rant. Secondly, the husband of popular female entertainer Afia Schwarzenegger was alleged to have released online a video of her naked within another man and threatened to pour acid on her for cheating on him. In the ensuing weeks, PDM has continued to question taken-for-granted gender ideologies, including through a growing advocacy on gendered social injustices. One notable act was the condemnation of the rape in early November 2017 of a four-year-old girl and of very sexist social responses toward which the group has been very vocal.

PDM is active on digital media; its members have appeared on popular national television talk shows and the group now has its own weekly radio programme. PDM is most active however on social media where it manages personal and group accounts on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (its Facebook page has grown from over 5000 followers in November 2017 to over 13,000 at the time of writing). Two PDM members have personal blogs, though the group does not yet have its own website. Its activism, then, is chiefly digitally inclined or online—a fact that separates it, at least strategically, from the larger women’s movement in Ghana.

PDM uses several key tools to pass its message and perform its politics:

‘Flipping the script’: Often humorous reversal of gender roles in common social narratives using stories that force a re-viewing of reified gendered perspectives. In one example, the group shared a twitter thread about a woman accused of 102 counts of penis grabbing where commenters questioned sarcastically the male accusers’ sexuality, motives, hypersensitivity, what they were wearing at the time, and inability to “take a compliment” in a reverse version of the victim-blaming commonly experienced by female victims of sexual harassment and abuse.

Storytelling: The sharing of lived experiences through personal stories that show connectivities among female/feminine lifeworlds. One thread on men’s inappropriate social touching of women showed how commonplace it is and how normalised it is considered by many men and women.

(Audio)visuals: In typical social media fashion, PDM uses photographs and videos of themselves, events that they organise or attend, and symbolic images to illustrate the narratives on their pages.

‘Allies’: The group also quotes periodically global feminist figures like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and bell hooks, and highlights the support of male feminists and political ‘godmothers’ like popular broadcaster, Gifty Anti, who curated the discussion among first generation feminists at the intergenerational dialogue mentioned earlier

Findings

Making sense of femininity

PDM’s self-perception is of women who do not see themselves as bound by gendered social norms). Yet their feminine performances of femaleness—manicured nails, hair, make-up, high heels: raise the question whether this is a matter of choice or conformity to gendered social norms around appropriate or desirable feminine appearance (McRobbie 2009, Dosekun 2015). The group’s individual and group rhetoric show clearly that their lived experiences of unbound femininity jar with ruling texts about the inferiority of women and form the foundation of their feminism and feminist activism. 

Subjectivities

Two loose subjectivities are being produced in the discourses within and around PDM’s activism: firstly, a subordinated femininity (what PDM terms ‘patriarchy princesses’) is being reproduced by men and women who subscribe to traditional gender logics. This is the core of the worst backlash facing the group. Secondly, a bifurcated emancipated femininity is emerging alongside—on one hand, it is confrontational and demanding radical changes in gender hierarchies while on the other, it is more moderate, pragmatic and accommodating and willing to take it slow. This recalls Nnaemeka’s (2003) negofeminism and Salo’s (2005) admonition against the false binary between reformist and radical women’s movements, and her acknowledgement that current mobilisation contexts require a strategic blend of both approaches. Within the pragmatic femininity and the subordinated femininity is the heavy influence of Pentecostal religious constructions of femininity that use Christian theology to justify the subordination of women.

Social media and the (re-)production of feminine subjectivities

Social media holds multiple significances for activism, some of which are peculiar to feminist resistance. PDM’s social media platforms offer alternative space and opportunity for critical and one-on-one interactions among various genders and gender ideologies, and across geographic and other boundaries—much of it in real time. Digital activism also makes gender injustice more visible (Padnis 2017, Radloff 2013), including by enabling its illustration using audiovisual props that can make phenomena more real than mere rhetoric. Social media’s openness and accessibility help show the links between the personal and the collective, and the local and the global that are not easily discernible otherwise.

That said, cyberspace is not gender-neutral; users bring their gender biases with them (Alofah 2015), enabling the re-production of misogynist subjectivities. The immediacy that it affords enables new forms and threats of violence against female users very direct, personal and unsettling. The political economies of Internet access and mobile telephony serve to disaggregate the ways in which people use and experience digital life and underscore the probable dominance of social media activity and discourses by certain social classes. Lastly, and there is not yet enough scholarly interrogation of this, the ways in which people use and experience cyberspace is gendered. This is true both in our consciousness of the Internet and the ways in which our physical gendered lives effect our digital lives. The tensions that emerge between both spaces are what Baer (2015) theorises as conflicted embodiment.

[i] I would like to acknowledge Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo for drawing my attention to this. I will write about the dialogue in a separate post.

About the Author

Titilope F. Ajayi is an independent editor, writer, and civil society and gender and security scholar. Currently a PhD student of international affairs at the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy, University of Ghana, Legon, Titilope coordinates the portal http://www.doingaphdinafrica.com/ and writes periodically for the Nonprofit Quarterly and CIHA Blog. She is also a 2017/8 Social Science Research Council Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Doctoral Fellow. For more, follow her on Twitter: @MataLope.