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Performing Power in a Mystical Context: Implications for Theorizing Women's Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

Constance Awinpoka Akurugu
Constance Awinpoka Akurugu*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Planning and Land Management, Department of Community Development, University for Development Studies, UPW 3, Wa Campus, P.O. Box UPW 3 Wa, Ghana
*
Corresponding author. Email: cakurugu@uds.edu.gh
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Abstract

This article builds on recent accounts of diffuse and complex agentic practices in the global South by drawing on ethnographic data gathered in northwestern Ghana among the Dagaaba. Contemporary feminist discourses and theories, particularly in contexts in the global South, have sought to draw attention to the multifaceted ways in which women exercise agency in these contexts. Practices that in the past were perceived as instruments of women's subordination or as re-inscribing their oppression have been re/interpreted as agentic. Agentic practices are theorized in more fluid terms than the binary pairing of agent/victim debates permit. Dagaaba contexts are deeply pervaded by beliefs in supernatural power forms, and these forces dis/empower certain forms of agentic acts. This article demonstrates that key factors combining with male power to regulate women's exercise of agency are perceived mystical forces. I argue that, in order not to risk missing agency—or rather “misdescribing” it—in the context of Dagaaba and most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where the belief in mystical forces is profoundly pervasive, the role of these power forms as important determinants of the form that agentic practices assume—and more broadly, the way power works—needs critical attention in feminist theorizing.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 2020 , pp. 549 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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