Amanda Gouws

This book deals with feminist institutionalism through asking the key question: can gender equality can be designed? It provides a critical analysis of the South African Commission for Gender Equality to assess its successes and failures over a more than 20-year period and provides insight into the design of structures of national gender machineries - how they are designed influences the outcomes for gender equality. The research in this collection sheds light on choices for institutional design of national gender machineries during democratic transitions, the co-optation of institutions, the silences and collusions of those selected to work in the institutions, the resourcing of institutions and their impact on policy making for women's substantive equality. This book will have a broad appeal for scholars of feminist institutionalism.

Designing for Gender Equality

Feminist Institutionalism in South Africa

This book deals with feminist institutionalism through asking the question if gender equality can be designed and applying an analysis related to this question to the South African Commission for Gender Equality.

Daiva Stasiulis

Multiculturalism is a concept that has been stretched to include a variety of political conditions, mainly in countries that have liberal democratic political systems and traditions. In this North/South ‘comparison’ we illuminate remedies pursued by governments and various political interests to address the binary. Tensions of culture and rights may not be the same everywhere. An interesting point of comparison is in the treatment of liberalism – often assumed in the global North to be the universal norms to be defended, whereas in the global South, liberalism itself may be viewed as the problem. Colonial histories are fraught with discriminatory legislation aimed at accommodating indigenous populations, often a trade-off for more structural redistributive justice through, for example, land reform. In Africa, for example, the codification of customary law has reinforced misogynistic and static interpretations of ‘African culture’. This book will show how varied and complex the embodiment of multiculturalism as a political practice, or policy discourse in different political contexts can be, and how often the outcome of multicultural discourses creates a binary between culture and universal human rights. The aim of this book is to grapple with dislodging this binary. This book was published as a special issue of Politikon.

North-South Perspectives

Gender and Multiculturalism

Joy Watson

Feminist Essays on the Global Women's Marches

Nasty Women Talk Back

Per Pettersson

Ignatius Swart

Frouwien Bosman

Johannes Erasmus

The topic covered by this book is important (crucially so in post-apartheid South Africa) and the research is meticulous. This has resulted in an impressive collection of material concerning welfare, religion and gender in twenty-first century South Africa, which includes both theoretical reflections and an abundance of empirical data. - Professor Grace Davie (Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Exeter, UK)

Amanda Gouws

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