We use recent empirical research with Muslim youth in three different West African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal) to explore how gender is performed and recruited in the constructions of religious and national identities. The Muslim youth claims to 'authentic' national and religious belonging pivoted on emphasised articulations of gender differences and hierarchies. To this extent their discourses of identity constantly invoked binary gender distinctions in which females were always subordinate to males. This gender symbolism was integral to both national and religious imaginaries.

Significantly, in this paper we illustrate how female Muslim youth were agentic in contesting their subordinate positioning. In doing so, they invoked both Islamic codes and juridical notions of gender equality enshrined in the national policies of the three countries. Whether drawing on religious or national codes however, the gender binary remained untroubled. For example, female youth drew on Islamic codes to point to men's obligations to them within Islam, but this left intact an assumed differentiation between male and female within Islamic practice. Furthermore, juridical codes, based in a liberal gender binary, were often readily dismissed as 'inauthentic' impositions of western/colonial origins and as in conflict with proper religious/Islamic practices, in ways that rendered female youth's contestations doubly problematic. Overall, our research shows the inadequacy of liberal understandings of gender equality for disrupting the powerful gender symbolism embedded in youth's national and religious imaginaries as well as the material conditions that emanate from these.

The Portuguese speaking African countries- which are as PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa)- and became independent in the mid 1970s, have experienced different historical and political pathways and have internal sociocultural complexities on their own.

Guinea-Bissau could count on women's contribution to the national liberation process. In spite of this, the post-independent period was arguably not followed by a political Agenda drawing from gender equity. Considering local differences, most women were confronted with the "betryal" of the promises made as far as the promotion of their socio-economic and political status in the following years was concerned. Based on field reserach conducted in the south region of Guinea-Bissau between 2014 and 2015 (interviews with ex-combatants and political leaders) and on theoretical African perspectives (AMADIUME, 1987; OYÈWUMÍ, 2005, 2010, 2015; ZELEZA, 2005; KOLAWOLE, 2002, 2004) on "gender" as central analytical concept that need to be reformulated/revisited/deconstructed since the category is also an epistemoogical problem and which logic of the social world cannot be seen as universally applicable, the paper seeks to discuss critically the following questions:

1- What are the achievements resulting from women's participation in the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau?

2- To what extent can (un)successful emancipation in Guinea-Bissau be explained by an understanding of gender as a concept (celebrated and defended by the nationalist narratives) which was/is (un)able to retrieve the local realities

With its 64 % of female representatives in the parliament, Rwanda's government has positioned itself as a worldwide leading actor in gender politics. Gender equality is considered a cross cutting issue in the ambitious development plan Vision 2020. Intertwined with the emergence of a middle class, these gender policies transform notions of feminity and role models for women and girls. This paper is about these "New Rwandan women". Highly educated, urban middle-class women are not only the primal beneficiaries of the gender and class policies, they are also central actors in defining new roles for themselves and in reshaping notions of feminity. In doing so, they navigate through ideas of gender equality and modernity as well as restrictive societal expectations, which persist despite all efforts to change "the traditional mindset". Based on data from biographic interviews I argue that middle-class women may sometimes be submitted to these conservative ideas from outside, but that they often choose freely to comply with them, for instance respecting the husband as chef de famille, taking care of the household and the children, or displaying virginity. Middle-class women claim they live the right combination of feminism and morality. This way, they distinguish themselves from uneducated, rural women, who - in their eyes - did not understand the concept of gender equality properly. What, then, does gender equality mean for Rwandan middle-class women? How do they define feminism? In this paper, I will shed light on these questions and thereby trace the notions of feminity in Rwanda.

Masquerading is an integral part of African culture that centres on land and the ancestors. In African societies, it seems as if men monopolise masquerading activities and women are not allowed to get directly involved or participate. This study is anchored in Igbo society and their masking traditions; Igbo society is an archetype of a patriarchal society. The argument of the paper is situated within the debate around the struggle for gender equality which is the main project of feminism. It tries to raise people's consciousness to the taken-for-granted issues in masquerade activities that help to reproduce and perpetrate the patriarchy. I have, as an initiate of a masquerade cult, participated in masquerade activities in parts of Igbo land for more than twenty-five years as a participant observer. I will, therefore, draw on my field notes, interviews, and photographic images, taken during field works. Apart from being active audience of masquerade activities and playing other key roles, women are inducted into masquerade cults and women inductees could commission and possess masquerades in some parts of Igbo land. Women do not take part in certain aspects of masking mainly because biology may not at times allow them. Therefore, the seemingly exclusion of women from masquerading activities is not a social construct to marginalise or debase the women but a recognition of their child-bearing role and its attendant constraints.

Violence is constructed by discourses that constrain men to perpetrators and women and children to victims. Categories of race and class further limit these constructions in South Africa due to multiple and diverse identities and the current explosion of public and scientific possibilities for violence driven by social inequalities and high rates of crime and sexual violence. This research aims to interrogate the cultural conditions that make possible forms of violence that disrupt our understandings of 'truth' and reality. The study thus turns to female and child perpetrators of physical and sexual violence and to male victims as targets for data collection. These configurations of the child-transgressor, woman-transgressor, and male victim offer an opportunity to decipher the material conditions that make such formulations possible and the elements of the cultural milieu that contribute to the surfacing of these 'new' transgressions in the psychological, legal and criminal disciplines and, thus, the public consciousness. The critical framework lends itself to critical discourse analyses based on participants' case files, court proceedings and interviews. This process will surface those discursive coordinates that make them 'real' and fathomable perpetrators and/or victims in the current South African landscape. By calling into question the universality of 'truths' about gender, sexuality, age and race and identifying the cultural conditions of possibility for victimhood and perpetration, this research intends to demonstrate how social, contextual and political categories define, limit and demarcate possibilities for identity in violent encounters.