A feminist post-structuralist critique of the transformative potential of Malawi’s gender equality law to promote adolescent sexual health

Abstract

Malawi enacted the Gender Equality Act (GEA) in 2013 to address gender inequality and promote sexual health and rights. The question the thesis addresses is whether the GEA itself an artefact of the very culture it would want to transform, could contribute to the transformation of social norms to improve the sexual health trajectories of adolescents. The thesis employs a hybrid approach to addressing the question, using a legal doctrinal methodology in combination with a feminist poststructural methodology of discourse analysis. The important assumption the thesis makes is that the GEA is part of a broader framework of discourse. The GEA as discourse draws upon prevailing discourses that shape people’s experience of sexuality. This is a challenge because the GEA’s conceptualisation of gender inequality and its implementation is influenced by the prevailing dominant gender discourses.

The thesis explains what it means for the GEA to influence social change. It explores the possibilities of it creating a radical world in which society recognises adolescents as social actors and agents who play a role in constituting their gendered and sexual worlds. Enabling the GEA to be transformational requires policy actors to interpret and implement the GEA to open new possibilities for adolescents. Only then can the GEA transcend its existential predicament of itself being an artefact of cultural discourse.