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Abstract:
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In August 2008, a woman living in rural southern Malawi provided her own definition of gender.
She said gender means there is no difference between women’s work and men’s work. Even though gender [in English] has come [yabwera] I still feel like there are other activities that women cannot do. Her use of the English word for gender (amid the other words in Chichewa) and her suggestion that gender “has come” to Malawi signal that she, and many other rural Malawians, view gender as new and brought into Malawi from outside. To some degree, this characterization is not completely inaccurate.
This study aims to illustrate how the tenor and character of the initial importation of the concept of gender into the Malawian context continues to impact, construct, and pose challenges to the study of gender in Malawi. Ultimately, the paper argues that complex and ethnographically grounded approaches to studying gender in Malawi may serve as a corrective to a long legacy of conceptual imperialism that has ramifications for both the researched and researchers in Malawi. |