Not-to-be-missed literary session about feminism

Just one of the many highlights on the programme for this year’s South African Book Fair will be a panel discussion with the intriguing title of Feminism – a global conversation.

The session, which will take place between 2.30 and 3.30pm on Saturday, September 8 at Johannesburg’s Newtown Precinct, will feature authors Malebo Sephodi, B Camminga, Anne Dahlqvist and Melanie Judge.

This session will discuss diverse literary spaces and writing, zooming in on “the expression of who I am”.  Each of the panellists is an activist who brings a different – and deeply engaging – perspective to the table.

Sephodi is a development worker and social commentator on development, identity and gender issues. She is also the author of the outspoken memoir Miss Behave, which challenges society’s beliefs about what it means to be an obedient woman.

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Tired of everyone else having a say about who and what she should be, Malebo renounced social expectations and set out to describe her journey towards open, creative, empowering misbehaviour.

As part of this journey, she has established Lady Leader on Facebook, a community platform that provides the opportunity for women to engage and simply to be.

Dahlqvist, who lives in Sweden, is a journalist specialising in women’s and girls’ rights. She is editor-in-chief of Ottar magazine and the author of several books.

Her groundbreaking book It’s Only Blood: Shattering the Taboo of Menstruation sets out to explore not only the persistent taboos about the subject, but also how those taboos often have grave consequences for women and girls in countries around the world.

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Judge is a queer and feminist activist and an adjunct associate professor and research associate at the Centre for Law and Society in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town.

Her books include Blackwashing Homophobia: Violence and the Politics of Sexuality, Gender and Race, which flings open the door on the hate crimes directed against queer South Africans and explores, among other things, the experience of lesbians.

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Camminga joined the African Centre for Migration and Society as a postdoctoral researcher in 2018. Their work tracked the conceptual journeying of the term “transgender” from the global north – along with the physically embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa – and considered the interrelationships between the two.

Their research interests include rights, migration, asylum and diaspora as they relate to transgender people from Africa; the bureaucratisation of gender in relation to transgender bodies and asylum regimes globally; possibilities for mobility and migration of transgender identified people from, across and within the African region and the history of “trans phenomena” in SA.

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