SITTING LIKE A GIRL

Professor of literature and award-winning writer PUMLA GQOLA offers her views on the FEMINIST MOVEMENT in our time.

I was 15 when I discovered the word “feminist” and embraced it. I loved finding out there were women all over the world who agreed on the unfairness of what we first called sexism and later patriarchy, and were trying to end it. A friend described it this way: as “a woman who will not be a doormat, thinks women can be anything they want and will defend others”. Feminism is a global movement of people who know patriarchy is unjust, and that human beings are not primarily flawed and in need of training into rigid roles of girl and boy, man and woman. The concept of feminism says there’s no automatic relationship between the sex encoded in our chromosomes and the way we want to dress, speak, love or dream. This is why we have to be trained into these roles – sometimes though seduction, but mostly through fear.

While my parents let my sisters, brother and me explore what we liked, when my grandmother visited I knew that the positions I found most comfortable were inappropriate. Gently at first, but later with some irritation, my gran would instruct me to sit with my legs closed all the time. I have always preferred to sit with with legs parted. Sitting like a girl still feels restrictive, although these are the positions I assume in public spaces now. Alone, or in friends’ homes, I continue to sit with my legs close to my upper body.

Where I felt comfort, grandmother saw danger in various guises. Perhaps she was thinking of how this comfort in my body would make me vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many women are taught to carry their bodies in specific ways to guard against sexual violence. Or maybe, the danger gogo saw was that I would turn into a woman who was not feminine enough to be married. Now, I choose to think that she was trying to cushion me from a string of vulnerabilities she suspected awaited me when I stepped out into the world. From her experience, she understood that South Africa was not kind to women who behaved like me. She can be forgiven for wanting to shield me from a racist, sexist world that did not care about what black girls wanted, one that violated them as a matter of course. Feminists reject patriarchy’s insistence that human beings come in two oppositional