Honoring Female Bodies, Respecting Women's Rights: Reflections on an African Feminist Ethics of Human Dignity

Recent scholarship in African feminist ethics has made a paradigm shift from the need to counter earlier colonial distortions of African realities to a self-reflexive engagement with internally generated structures and norms that regulate people's lives. This new ethical engagement is organized around two overlapping questions: Who and what are Africans to one another? What exactly does one African body mean to another African body? I argue that a distinctive answer to these questions from recent works in African feminist ethics is the deployment of the language of dignity to enact a vision of egalitarian honor and freedom through an emancipatory praxis of human rights.