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Browsing by Author "Ossome, Lyn"

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Can the Law Secure Women's Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions Between Culture and Land Commercialization
(Feminist Economics, 2014) Ossome, Lyn
This contribution is concerned with the challenges of securing women’s rights to land in Africa in the context of contemporary land deals through a discussion of three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of women’s land rights discourses. First, this study discusses the interface between rights and “custom” to highlight the inherent distortions of African customary law. Second, it argues that liberal formulations of the law are limited by a set of assumptions regarding women’s position in the political economy. And third, this discussion discursively assesses the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law in protecting women’s rights to land. The discussion proceeds from a critique of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land tenure systems: the institutional approach, which deals with women’s formal land rights; and the political economy approach, which deals with the structural nature of women’s traditional relations to land.
The care economy and the state in Africa’s Covid-19 responses
(Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 2021) Ossome, Lyn
The responses of many low- and middle-income households to Covid-19 in Africa were mediated by the state through various means including direct cash transfers, food distribution, and distribution of rural agricultural produce to urban areas, in response to the social reproduction crisis that the pandemic precipitated. Taking the relationship between the state and household as its focus, this article reflects on the social and political questions emerging at the conjuncture of social provisioning and economic collapse. Central to these concerns is the structure of care economies in Africa and their relationship to the capitalist state.
In Search of the State? Neoliberalism and the labour question for pan-African feminism
(Feminist Africa, 2015) Ossome, Lyn
Since the 1970s, informal work has expanded and appeared in new guises in the context of globalisation, neo-liberalism and migration, all of which are highly gendered processes (Chen et al. 2004; ILO 2002b, 2007a). An as yet unsettled question posed within feminist debates is whether women’s increased participation in informal economic activity contributes to their empowerment or their impoverishment (Meagher 2010). While economists have tended to see the informal economy as a source of economic opportunity for women in a sphere free of the gender-biased regulations of the formal economy (USAID 2005), more critical feminist and political-economy analyses have argued that the informal economy represents a poverty trap for women, concentrating them in low-skill, low-income activities with little prospect of advancement (Chant and Pedwell 2008; Chen et al 2006; Sassen 2002). Recent ILO research on gender and informal economies, and gender studies of global value chains offer gender analyses of wider global economic change processes, paying attention to informal labour markets, global commodity chains and transnational livelihood networks (Barrientos et al. 2003; Sassen 2002). These studies show that global and national economic changes have not limited women’s entry into labour markets, but rather incorporate them on unfavorable terms. Women are pushed into temporary and vulnerable employment within the informal economy, and excluded from more lucrative opportunities opened up by globalisation and liberalisation (Meagher 2010).
Land in transition: from social reproduction of labour power to social reproduction of power
(Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2021) Ossome, Lyn
Ifi Amadiume’s seminal work, Male Daughters, Female Husbands developed significant insights into the relationship between gender, wealth and power, and anticipated the centrality of gendered labour processes in the survival of the family/ household by highlighting the articulation between reproductive labour and the productive economy. In this epoch when various postcolonial states are grappling anew with land and agrarian questions, Amadiume’s detailed study of the decommodification of land is especially salient for feminist inquiry as she has already drawn attention to the ways in which land functions generationally in the reproduction of authority, ritual, governance, kinship and power. This paper proposes a similar move beyond the present discourses which emphasise women’s roles in the social reproduction of labour power, asking how a critical reading of Amadiume might help us understand the significance of social reproduction in relation to land as a contemporary realm of feminist power and struggles.
Limits to Democracy and Emancipatory Politics in South Africa post-1994
(Inequality, Democracy Development, 1994) Ossome, Lyn
Who is the subject of democracy? For whom does it hold out promise, and how does the existential condition of those who aspire for freedom through democracy impose conditions upon the very practice of democracy? In this paper I show how racialized, classed, autochthonized and gendered people in South Africa are gradually being condemned towards a ‘slow death’, and towards an existence more akin to the ‘living dead’. As the people’s possibilities of freedom become more and more defined by and restricted to place, inward-looking logics – anti-immigration legislation and xenophobia– deepen the notion of South Africa’s exceptionalism and, increasingly, the people seek a reactionary validation from within the ethnic group, nation and race. Such de-radicalization of a politics of being is more profoundly expressed as the reality of abject existence becomes apparent and the people no longer find validation or affirmation of their humanity in and of itself. Reduced to their ‘entitlements’ rather than their rights, the people are faced with the stark realization that the government has long abandoned them, and the race/nation/gender/class to which allegiance once meant a politics of resistance, now merely function as institutionalized identities, depoliticized by their (neo)liberal application under the constitution. As social identities becomes a liability, so too do any politics that suggest a common existence and a politics of struggle based on shared suffering. This atomization of individuals and their alienation from the structural roots of their oppression suggests the impossibility of claiming justice from a state that has long disarticulated its interests from those presented by the people, and now merely functions as a guarantor of society’s slow death.
Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa
(Journal of Political Economy, 2021) Ossome, Lyn
In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.
Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India
(Journal of Political Economy, 2016) Naidu, Sirisha C.; Ossome, Lyn
Using a social reproduction framework, this article explores how reproduction of rural working class households is rearticulated to capitalist production in India. Our analysis of the conditions in India reveals that the interaction of three institutions—market, state and household—has imposed the burden of reproduction on women. In turn, women’s work is dependent on private and common lands. This link, between the role of women’s unpaid labour in reproducing rural households and the fact that this work remains largely dependent on land, constitutes a failure of the Indian economy to provide decent livelihoods. It also reasserts gender equity as a contemporary and unresolved question in the midst of India’s agrarian transition and underscores the importance of instituting agrarian reforms and state intervention at levels sufficient for social reproduction.
State, Civil Society and Expanding Social and Solidarity Economy among Informal Sector Women in Ethiopia
(UNRISD Conference on Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy, 2013) Ossome, Lyn
The paper draws from empirical evidence gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from April-May 2012, during field research to investigate the social and political dynamics of women’s community activism there.1 It examines the ways in which women engaged in informal sector work are being organised under savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs), and through this critique, investigates the potential for expanding social and solidarity economy (SSE) through savings and credit cooperatives. The guiding hypothesis is that the political economy of policy changes in Ethiopia under which the savings and credit cooperatives are being formed delimits the possibility of expanding SSE through this method. Women in Addis Ababa are involved in many forms of informal sector work, most of which offer minimum wage, is dangerous at times, and most importantly, has failed to significantly lift them out of poverty. At the same time, however, women’s organisations in Addis Ababa have shown remarkable initiative with regards to mobilizing women around savings and cooperative schemes aimed at mobilizing women to save and regenerate their own incomes. These schemes enjoy a broad reach, and include women working as coffee sellers, weavers, street vendors, domestic workers, firewood carries, garbage collectors and even street beggars. There are a number of initiatives to empower women especially those that have no education and income, through savings, loans and income generating activities. Many are organized under self-help groups and cooperatives, which not only have economic objectives but also play an important social and cultural role in bringing together women who previously would not work together due to cultural discrimination and stigma around certain work, like garbage collection, which are identified with a lower caste.
Women’s work in the context of closing civic space
(A Journal on African Women’s Experiences, 2018) Ossome, Lyn
The contemporary closing of civic space and the attendant impact on social justice movements is impacting the world of women’s work in ways that ought to be understood against the backdrop of shifts in labour relations, increasing unemployment, expansion of the informal economic sector, low minimum wages, de-unionisation, the growth and waste of the financial sector, deregulation, and changing regimes in taxation, among other factors. This article highlights the nature of social organising among labouring women, drawing on historical contexts to highlight the complexities that emerge in the contemporary period, which are attached both to the nature of the neoliberal state and civil society. Focusing on the legislative and punitive state, the paper examines contradictions that confound the demand for rights where the state is both guarantor of rights and mediator of capital and draws some preliminary conclusions in this regard. For many labouring women in Africa, the modes of struggle and social organising that have historically defined their world have characteristically emanated from below and in relation to their lived contexts and realities. Such struggles have articulated social and economic questions that also critically articulate political questions of autonomy, freedom and equality. In precolonial African kinship systems, the flexibility of gender in the political and cultural system favoured the presence of women in the highest elite core of society, whether in the status acquired through titles, or in the position of the kinship itself. Power and authority emerged out of the reproductive and productive roles that women played in society, and women’s political power emerged out of those roles articulated to daily struggles for survival (Lebeuf, 1963; Amadiume, 1987; Santoru, 1996; Oyewumi, 1997; Ossome, 2018).
Work, Gender, and Immiseration in South Africa and India
(Review of Radical Political Economics, 2018) Naidu, Sirisha C.; Ossome, Lyn
In this paper, we broaden Marx’s immiseration thesis to articulate social reproduction under capitalist growth. Specifically, we compare the female labor market in the context of the wage economy, the family-household, and the state, three institutions that influence the productionreproduction system. Our observations lead us to conclude that the neoliberal growth path has exacerbated inequities in the opportunities for female workers in both countries. Our findings affirm both the differentiation and homogenization of conditions of reproduction under capitalist exploitation.

Browsing by Author "Ossome, Lyn"

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