New Books in Anthropology

Joanna Allan, "Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019)

Sep 20, 2024

Joanna Allan, an expert on women's resistance in oppressive regimes, discusses her book on Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea. She explores the unique roles of women in these diverse resistance movements amid authoritarian rule. Allan highlights how gender intersects with colonial histories and the importance of acknowledging women's contributions to civil rights. She also sheds light on the concept of 'genderwashing' where regimes manipulate equality narratives, while underlying tensions from external economic interests complicate genuine progress for women's rights.

58:35

Episode guests

Joanna Allan

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

The book highlights the critical yet overlooked roles of women in the resistance movements of Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea against authoritarian regimes.

Joanna Allan's concept of 'genderwashing' reveals how states and corporations manipulate claims of promoting gender equality to conceal ongoing women's rights violations.

Deep dives

Knowledge Discovery and Personalized Recommendations

A non-profit service focuses on helping users discover quality content from the vast information available online. They utilize technology to monitor a multitude of sources, allowing human curators to handpick the best offerings each week for their users. Subscribers can customize their feeds based on their interests, selecting from various topics and languages. This service aims to provide personalized recommendations not just for podcasts but also for essays, books, academic articles, and videos.

Intro

2min

Women’s Resistance in Colonized Territories

21min

Exploring Women's Resistance in Equatorial Guinea: A Call for Academic Focus

4min

Feminism and Nationalism in Colonial Contexts

15min

The Qadimah Sikh Protests: Intersection of Western Sahara and the Arab Spring

2min

Dictatorship and Oppression in Equatorial Guinea

4min

Unearthing Women's Voices in Colonial Resistance

8min

Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men.

In Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (U Wisconsin Press, 2029), Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to a subject that has often been looked at through the lens of literary studies to examine how concerns for equality and women's rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects. She reveals how Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with Western states and corporations, conjure a mirage of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women's rights in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals, and other natural resources. This genderwashing, along with historical local, indigenous, and colonially imposed gender norms mixed with Western misconceptions about African and Arab gender roles, plays an integral role in determining the shape and composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology