ESTABLISHED IN 1987
AGENDA FEMINIST MEDIAAgenda aims to question and challenge current understandings and practices of gender relations. We contribute to the development of new knowledge about how gender relations can be transformed. In particular, we contribute to the development of women and their capacity to organize themselves, reflect on their experiences and write about this.
About Us
Empowering Women for Gender Equity
Who We Are
Agenda Feminist Media is committed to giving women a forum, a voice and skills to articulate their needs and interests towards transforming unequal gender relations. We aim to question and challenge current understandings and practices of gender relations.
What We Do
Agenda has been at the forefront of feminist publishing in South Africa for the past 35 years. Through our flagship project, the Agenda journal, we raise debate around women’s rights and gender issues. Visit publisher Taylor & Francis Online to buy copies.
Get Involved
Agenda values participatory and transparent processes and provides opportunities for individual growth and development. We host quarterly feminist dialogues in Durban, Cape Town and Pretoria. See the bottom of this page for upcoming events near you.
Citizen Journalism Project
Would you like to support our activities? All you need is a cellphone and access to WhatsApp. Sign up to become a volunteer.
Upcoming Events
June 24, 2022 - Hybrid Journal Launch
1:30 pm The Intimacies of Covid-19. Click here for details.
June 10, 2022 - Journal Launch (Online)
4:30 pm Gendered Implications of New Technologies and Posthuman Subjectivities: Perspectives from the Global South. Click here to watch.
IBSS/SAPSE accredited and peer reviewed
Latest Journals
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Bulletin Board
Call For Abstracts: Feminist Advocacy
Contributors are invited to submit manuscripts on the above topic from either an activist or research perspective. Abstracts and contributions must be written in English and in a style that is accessible to a wide audience. Please submit abstracts to...
INVITATION: Online Journal Launch of Agenda Journal Themed Beijing +25
GUEST EDITORS: Amanda Gouws (SARChI Chair in Gender Politics) and Diana Højlund Madsen (Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden) Round table discussion on the contribution and impact of the Beijing Platform of Action in different African countries...
Launch of Gender & Disability journal
Agenda Feminist Media and Women's & Gender Studies Department, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape invite you to the launch of journal: Gender & Disability Date: Tuesday - 20th October 2015 Time: 12h00 – 14h00 Venue: HIVE, Arts...
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Latest Articles
Framing notes – COVID-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics
By Danai S. Mupotsa & Moshibudi Motimele
This special issue of Agenda began with our interest in the type of questions that would emerge if people-centred sites of intimacy and vulnerability that are generally foreclosed from public space and national narratives. As the COVID-19 virus spread and the discourse around ‘pandemic’ grew traction, along with the panic concerning transmission, risk and the costs of social isolation, it also soon appeared that those who predominantly occupied the position of ‘at risk’ mapped almost identically with those most marginalised by racism, capitalism and patriarchy.
More importantly, though, it appeared that the pandemic, here represented by virus, meant that heightened vulnerability to harm resulted in reduced visibility of that harm – so that the effects and affects of this moment of coalescing pandemics shifted the dynamics of people’s forms and capacities to make a life for themselves. The event of this pandemic, in this sense, represented multiple and concurrent forms of pandemic in relation to the workings of racism, capitalism and nationalism which further invisibilised the relationship between gendered and racialised formations of power and the intimate experiences of isolation, violence and precariousness suffered by many.
Marriage, intimacy, and the messy politics of COVID-19 in India
By Avilasha Ghosh
The COVID-19 outbreak has radically altered interpersonal relations and intimacies. This briefing highlights the specific ways in which intimacies have been impacted, transformed and given new meanings during the COVID-19 pandemic by bringing to the fore case studies of engaged and newly wedded heterosexual couples in India. It challenges the public-private dichotomy by highlighting how interpersonal intimacies become embedded in complex structures like the State, labour, gender, law, and international relations.
Through the various interviews cited here, I examine the hardships and challenges that the coronavirus pandemic in India had introduced into people’s daily lives and conjugal relations. Additionally, I show how the governmental policies of a nationwide lockdown, self-isolation, work from home, and social distancing had adversely impacted the mental health, emotional wellbeing and socio-economic conditions of several individuals. In light of my findings, I attempt to reconceptualise ‘intimacy’ in pandemic times as a multilayered and ever-evolving concept that skips fixed definitions, and which can be deployed as a useful analytical tool to study the messy entanglements between the ‘quotidian’ and the ‘political’.