Overview
Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely post-Western perspectives. More specifically, the anthology's main contribution is its explicit focus on feminist parenting from the margins to the global periphery: from Africa and its diaspora, from the Global South to Europe and America. The 27 parents from diverse backgrounds, walks of life, and countries gathered in this anthology share powerful responses to the above questions by narrating their experiences of some of the challenges, dilemmas, promises, and compromises of parenting with a feminist perspective. The volume is one of the first collections published with first-person essays describing very touching, beautiful, and sometimes painful stories of what it means and more importantly what it costs to become a feminist parent with an intersectional approach. In doing so, the authors of this book aim at (re)claiming parenting as a necessarily political terrain for subversion, radical transformation, and resistance to patriarchal oppression and sexism.Reviews
With this moving collection, Rama Salla Dieng and Andrea O'Reilly manage to assemble diverse voices in a stirring, necessary and powerful feminist reclamation of the historically invisibilised labour of mothering and parenting. The essays cut across racial, gender, queer, and geographical difference, raising difficult questions regarding what it means to parent as a feminist, and how feminism shapes our experiences and aspirations of parenting. The narratives are beautifully told and deeply personal, and the questions they raise, myriad. The realizations of longing, sacrifice, solidarity, love, compromise, intimacy, guilt, despondency, triumph and joy that these stories reveal will be familiar to every feminist. - Lyn Ossome Senior Research Fellow, Makerere Institute of Social ResearchAuthor Biography
Andrea O'Reilly, PhD, is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at York University. O'Reilly is founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, and founder and publisher of Demeter Press. Rama Salla Dieng, PhD, is a Senegalese writer, academic, and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.