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.
get involved
Bulletin Board
What counts as Gender-Transformation, anyway?
Contributors are invited to write on the topic above from either a research or an activism perspective. Abstracts and contributions must be written in English and in a style accessible to a wide audience. Submit abstracts on Scholar One...
HYBRID LAUNCH: The Intimacies of COVID-19
Agenda Feminist Media and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation invite you to a hybrid workshop and the Launch of the Agenda Special Issue, “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics”. WHEN: Friday, June 24, 2022 (1:30 PM-6 PM)...
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...
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.
Events
March 30th, 2023 - Journal Launch (Online)
1.00 pm SAST/2.00 pm EAT. Feminist Advocacy in Africa: Voices and Actions. Click here for details.
June 24, 2022 - Hybrid Journal Launch
1:30 pm The Intimacies of Covid-19. Click here for details.
IBSS/SAPSE accredited and peer reviewed
Latest Journals
read
Latest Articles
Embodying transnational queer Black and Brown utopia in alternative QTPOC nightlife spaces
By Maya Bhardwaj
This focus explores queer Black and Brown feminist and utopian politics as imagined in modern-day alternative nightlife spaces. This is done through case studies of the QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Colour) nightlife spaces of Queertopia by the Other Village People in Johannesburg, Misery Party and Pxssy Palace in London, and Papi Juice and BK Boihood in New York. These cities are particularly lifted up as spaces of Black and Brown resistance to white dominance and racial capital, even within LGBTQIA+ spaces that implicitly or explicitly do not cater to Black and Brown queers.
Through these examinations, it is argued that queer feminists of colour are embodying queer utopia through parties that centre healing, mental health, ancestral faith practices, queer Black and Brown music and dance traditions, and spaces for activists and cultural workers to gather beyond mainstream bars and nightlife. By linking these practices to transnational resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and by particularly catering to queer people of colour involved in social movement, resistance, and cultural organising work, these parties exist as experiments in Black and Brown transnational feminist practice. This article examines the bonds that organisers and attendees of these parties build with each other across borders, both in physical nightlife spaces as well as in digital spaces conducted during COVID-19 lockdowns that explicitly brought queer people of colour together to dance and dream transnationally. It ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices of imagining the possibility of utopias where queer people of colour thrive beyond borders.
‘Complex’ and ‘diverse’: Meaning-making and affirming practices as healing justice
By Chenai Mupotsa-Russell
This perspective draws from my insights in advocacy and therapeutic practice as an African art therapist in Australia. Along with my own positionalities, I have often been involved specifically producing projects related to LGBTIQA + people, migrant communities, First Nations people and other minoritised people in advocacy work. As a therapist, it is not only necessary to be attentive to the ways intersectionality operates as it relates to people who are frequently framed as ‘complex’ and diverse’, these locations and the often pathologising framework of our positions are amplified by where and how neurodiversity is understood for people in the position of therapeutic work. The national sentiment in Australia often frames engagement with those who are complex and diverse through intentions around social inclusion, so multiculturalism and diversity shape the sociocultural as well therapeutic space precisely because they fail to capture the connected structures of power people are engaging, and a transformative ethical intentionality. That is, that questions related to power, and the force of cis-heteronormativity, neurotypicalness, white supremacy, classism and ableism.
More specifically, in therapeutic practice, the onus is often on me to confront what sickness, trauma, pain, or even treatment mean when we decentre the biomedical models of mental health that frame our operations. I reflect on how I moved from state-operated practice to build my own practice intended to intentionally make a safer space for Black, indigenous and people of colour, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent and disabled communities. I engage with the continued complexities of building multiple processes of meaning-making as a form of healing justice.