All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
A faint, bittersweet smile touched her lips as she recalled her PhD acceptance. She had felt a surge of hope, a sense of coming full circle. She had respected Professor Madi and Professor Benny, seeing them as the next generation of Black feminist scholars. They were sharp, published, and held senior positions in what had, in a sign of the times she had initially welcomed as progress, been renamed the Department of Gender Studies from its original incarnation as Women’s Studies. “We need to move beyond the biological,” she remembered Professor Madi saying at an orientation, and Fezikile had nodded, thinking she meant moving beyond the biological determinism of the oppressors. She had not understood then that they meant moving beyond the biological reality of women.
Fezikile entered the supervision meeting with the quiet pride of a craftswoman presenting her life’s work. The air in the small, sterile office, smelling faintly of disinfectant and stale coffee, was initially warm. Professor Madi, chic in a way that spoke more of international conferences than community halls, began with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She praised the draft’s “passion” and its “significant historical weight,” her words draping the thesis in a shroud of respectable, but ultimately defanged, admiration.
Then came the pivot. “We feel the analysis could be strengthened, Fezikile,” she said, her voice softening into a tone of gentle conspiracy. “Strengthened by expanding your framework to be more inclusive of the violence experienced by trans, gender non-binary, and queer individuals.”
Fezikile remained calm, her posture unchanged. She had faced down armed men; she would not be cowed by academic rhetoric. “Thank you for the feedback, Professor,” she began, her voice even. “But my methodological focus is precise for a reason. My research is about a specific, sex-based phenomenon rooted in the material reality of the female body. Violence against our trans comrades is real, and it is a struggle we must all support, but its drivers and manifestations are different. To conflate them would be an analytical error, a disservice to both struggles. With respect, that is not my topic.”
Professor Benny, who had been silent until now, leaned forward. Her glasses sat low on her nose, and she peered over them like a prosecutor. “With all due respect, Fezikile,” she countered, her tone sharp and devoid of Madi’s feigned warmth, “that position is highly problematic. It reinforces a cis-normative, biological essentialism that is fundamentally at odds with contemporary Black feminist thought.”
“Cis-normative?” Fezikile repeated the word slowly, as if tasting something bitter. “Professor, I am speaking about the reality that South Africa is the rape capital of the world. I am speaking about the fact that biological women—what you call ‘cis women’—and lesbians are the primary victims of this violence. These are not abstract categories. These are bodies. Real bodies that bleed, that carry pregnancies forced upon them, that are mutilated and murdered.”
Prof Benny delivered the killing blow, her voice laced with a triumphant, righteous fury. “I have to be honest,” she said, her eyes glinting. “I am shocked to hear this kind of TERF rhetoric from you, of all people.”
The next meeting was the final violation. Professor Benny, armed with a stack of freshly printed journal articles, dispensed with all pretence of dialogue.
“True Black feminism,” Benny intoned, “is a project of dismantling all binaries, of deconstructing the very category of ‘woman.’ The colonial project imposed rigid gender categories on African societies. By focusing on biological sex, you are replicating that colonial violence.”
Fezikile felt something snap inside her. “Professor,” she said, her voice cutting through the lecture, “are you seriously suggesting that the concept of ‘woman’ is a colonial imposition? That before colonialism, African women did not know they were female? That the violence we experience—rape, forced marriage, genital mutilation—is somehow less real because you have decided that biology is a Western construct?”
And in that moment, the fog of her grief and confusion lifted, replaced by the cold, hard clarity of the front line. Fezikile looked at the two women before her and saw them for what they were. They were not mentors; they were gatekeepers. They were not scholars; they were careerists. Their “wokeness” was not a political commitment but a currency, a fashionable new dialect they had mastered to trade for institutional power, for research grants, for the approval of a Western academic complex that was always hungry for new, exotic theories from the Global South. They were handmaidens, not to a revolution, but to an ideology that was consuming its own. They were not trying to improve her thesis. They were trying to break it—and her—to prove their own loyalty to the new creed.
Fezikile sat in her study, the archive of her life’s work bearing silent witness. The marked-up draft of her thesis lay on the desk before her, its pages bleeding with the red ink of her supervisors’ comments. She read them slowly, each one a small violence. “Replace ‘women’ with ‘gendered bodies,’” one comment read. “Reframe ‘male violence’ as ‘interpersonal violence,’” instructed another. In the margins of a paragraph about femicide, Professor Madi had written: “This language is exclusionary. Consider: ‘violence against feminised bodies.’” On a page documenting the specific trauma of pregnancy resulting from rape, Professor Benny had scrawled: “Essentialist. Not all women can become pregnant. Revise to be inclusive of all gender identities.”
With a steady hand that had once held placards, comforted survivors, and signed affidavits, Fezikile took a single, clean sheet of paper. She began to write. It was not a rebuttal. It was not an appeal. It was a formal letter of withdrawal from the PhD programme.
Source: ISSUE 18: The Frontline – The Frontline
