(Re)-Construction of womanhood in Lesotho : Narratives of ‘Unmarried’ Basotho women (Methepa

Abstract

By posing a provocative question, “What is a Woman?” this thesis intended to deconstruct normative conceptions of womanhood which are essentialised to marriage. To achieve these ends, I located the key questions of this thesis within intersecting theoretical premises of decolonial, African and Black feminisms. Intersectionality augmented by the framework of uMakhulu , that privileges the indigenous world-senses, are the tools of analysis to achieve better insight into how notions of womanhood bear multiplicities, complexities and ambiguities. Through the narrated life-stories of twenty ‘unmarried’ Basotho women (Methepa), I explored re-constructions of womanhood and the role of women’s agency in this process. Through these ‘invisibilised’ narratives, it is established that womanhood and the meanings thereof are located within a messy terrain of intersecting religio-socio-cultural and indigenous forces. I argued that these beg unpacking in identity re-construction to reveal multidimensional and complex constructions of Mosotho womanhood. Untangling these intricacies provides an anchor for deconstructing, and finally debasing, colonial hetero-patriarchal eurocentric universalism that plagues contemporary constructions of womanhood essentialised to marriage. At the core of this thesis lies the contention that ‘unmarried’ Basotho women (Methepa) are agents who are aware of the gendered social, cultural, religious terrain that necessitates marriage; which in turn, shapes their constructions of womanhood and agency. Unstructured interviews on past lived experiences of childhood and adulthood reveal self-definition characteristic to ‘unmarried’ Basotho women’s (Methepa) agency constructed and enacted within the locus of marginality. Within the analytic chapters titled ‘(Re)construction of womanhood’ is an appreciation of how women’s agency and their re-constructions of womanhood are shaped by childhood experiences of ‘becoming’ Woman as reflected upon in the chapter titled ‘The young Mosotho girl’. These chapters reflect the continuities of time; ‘then-now’ and space; ‘there-here’, to illustrate how ‘unmarried’ women’s senses of self and subjectivities are located in intersecting ‘modern’ Christianised and ‘indigenous’ terrains. Moreover, the findings reveal multiple reconfigurations of womanhood characterised by a complex, contradictory and convoluted enmeshment of multiple forces borne out of the world-senses of ‘unmarried’ Basotho women (Methepa). My conclusion is, partly that ‘unmarried’ Basotho women’s (Methepa) constructions of womanhood deconstruct the hegemonic constructions of womanhood. Therefore, not only does the analysis achieve epistemic redress by giving voice to historically silenced and subordinated knowledges, but it also places as central the indigenous African world-senses as the new anchor of African women’s identity and agency.