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Document Details : Title: When the Hairy Suffer Baldness Subtitle: Feminized Poverty and Social Exclusion as Problems of Social Justice in Africa Author(s): OMOTOSO, Sharon Adetutu Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 27 Issue: 1 Date: 2020 Pages: 117-138 DOI: 10.2143/EP.27.1.3288831 Abstract : This article sets out to show how poverty connects with gender equality and reduced inequalities in the discourse of social justice in Africa. Literature is replete with problems of social exclusion and inequality in the narrow sense of financial impoverishment. Poverty is then indicated by denial in education, capital intensive economic activities and politics, while little or no attention has been paid to the malignancy of inequality and social exclusion that counteract recently increased feminine agency in Africa. Consequently, this work argues that much of what obtains among urban women is social exclusion at policy-making platforms, unlike their rural counterparts who lament exclusion due largely to a lack of or limited access to welfare infrastructures to meet physiological needs. Given the above, social exclusion and feminized poverty may not be restricted to monetary criteria, but also the ability and capacity of women (curiously affect elite women) to influence social policies. This work hereby embodies social justice issues using the hair to convey the possibility of having female elites ideologically tagged ‘hairy’ and grassroots women tagged ‘hairless’. By this, being hairless is sufficient to explain social exclusion, poverty and inequality, but more it is worrisome when the ‘hairy’ who are at home in policy making spheres are themselves sidelined. The present contribution designates this as ‘threatened baldness’. Using methods of critical analysis and reflective argumentation, this work focuses on the social exclusion of women in policy-making processes as another dimension to feminized poverty evidence of social injustice. The work proffers symbiotic interactionism as an intra-feminist tool, positing that it is by seeking reduced inequalities that concerted efforts of women towards achieving gender equality and ultimately combating poverty can bring about social justice in Africa. |
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