2 - Re-framing Women's Revolutionary, Lives: Women, Gender & Local Resistance

Summary

Moving on from the notion of revolutionary resistance tied to a unified peasant or feminist consciousness, an alternative framework of Gendered Localised Resistance is developed in this chapter. It involves rethinking revolutionary resistance to better understand rural women's experiences of guerrilla war and shifts our understanding towards individualised and localised resistance by women as a major feature of women's participation. Localised resistance is discussed in the light of James Scott's (1985) work on ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’ that highlights the personalised and class dimensions of consciousness and actions in the context of South Asia and the Green Revolution in agricultural production. I challenge his impermeable boundaries of the local context of resistance through the use of Michel Foucault's ideas of power and resistance as tied to subjectivity and the creation of identities. Building on this critique, I suggest and explore the modalities of localised resistance as practised by women in the forging of identities in this study of Zimbabwe's liberation war. These discussions broaden the field of possibilities for the agency of women and shift the focus to understanding the complexity of women's social relations and self-identifications in the course of war. The agency and participation of women in revolution is interpreted through their subjectivity – their agency of being. Resistance and survival are highlighted as two key aspects of that subjectivity. How important these dimensions are for any particular woman is suggested to be a matter of context and her experience of identities through everyday social relations.