Ubuntu and the gender question: Towards a gender-inclusive theory

Abstract

In this thesis, I set out to investigate the 'gender question' in its relations to ubuntu which has been said to offer a uniquely African moral framework. Here, the 'gender question' has a double function: 1) to broaden the notion of the 'woman question', aimed primarily at equality between men and women, to include all genders; and 2) to indicate the questions raised about gender as they relate to ubuntu. My reason for undertaking this project is that even though ubuntu has been met with much positivity, it has also been criticised for being vague, pre-scientific, elitist and deeply implicated in practices of patriarchy and heteronormativity - norms which impose a logic according to which heterosexuality is posited implicitly and explicitly as better, just as the primacy of manhood is. This raises an important question: If ubuntu is not only a moral framework but also a normative moral framework, what are its gendered assumptions and correlative gendered affordances? In other words, are its gendered assumptions just or are they in need of problematisation? To address this question, I look at studies on affordance and the perception of affordance, or the set of possibilities for action available to agents in their environments, as well as governmentality, to show how gendered race and racialised gender became sites of knowledge that themselves functioned as organising principles and logics whose power was to produce, demarcate and control bodies in specific ways. Important for the purposes of this study is my argument that change cannot occur epistemologically or ethically without ontology being addressed. To do so, I employ a counter-mapping methodology to create a cartography of opacity, fugitivity, Africanfuturism, Afro-feminism, motherism and commoning to disrupt hegemonic archives of feminism and ubuntu. Through this, I yoke ontology to ecology to posit the importance of an onto-ecological view in which human and human, as well as human and nature, are brought together in the wholeness of ubuntu. Such understandings of wholeness are, as I show, an important part of much indigenous knowledges of the Global South generally and Africa specifically. In short, my argument is that for a gender-inclusive ubuntu to emerge, its ontological assumptions and underpinning must be scrutinised and changed - only then can a truly just ethics emerge.