Patricia McFadden

Patricia McFadden (born 1952) is a radical African feminist, sociologist, writer, educator, and publisher from eSwatini. She is also an activist and scholar who worked in the anti-apartheid movement for more than 20 years.

Patricia McFadden in 2019

Quotes

• All nationalisms are expressions of ideology that brings large numbers of people together to resist oppressive, dominant, intrusive systems.
  • Part of her replies when she was talking about her feminist trajectory and how it began

• Feminists always create new languages. The normative language is inadequate to say what we want to say and to do what we want to do.
  • Talking about the state, the UN and the women’s movement, and how connected it is with the current situation of the United Nation

• Whites who continue to benefit from racism as institutionalized privilege don’t call themselves white Africans, but call us Black Africans. It’s so astounding the ways in which neoliberalism depoliticizes and erases our histories of resistance. It disowns us from the legacies that we should be protecting and mobilizing with to continue the struggle.
  • Her reply when asked if she sees the movement of depoliticizing concepts also with race

• Feminism is so powerful: because it is not an event that is just emerging now. It is embedded in the oldest memories of human consciousness about freedom. We are born with this instinct to be free and then begin the struggle to resist the attempts to appropriate our freedom, which we experience through the marking of our bodies and the commodification of our bodies.
  • women’s participation in the anti-colonial struggles, and its recovery of the feminist past of African women.

• We can breed, we can labor, we are creative, we are the first mathematicians, the first scientists, the first agriculturalists, we are a treasure trove. In the moment of male awareness about how amazing and central women are in the creation of surplus and the re-creation of human productivity, then arises the notion of power, exercised through the ownership of women’s bodies.
  • Highlighting what women are capable of, and achievements

• What were called “alternatives to capitalism”, like socialism, communism, and other expressions of egalitarianism were largely crafted, imagined and framed by males. We must bring our feminism to the alternative, with all its different energies and expressions not only of resisting patriarchy, but also of celebrating who we are and who we want to become as women.
  • Her presentation of the ideas of Contemporarity as a way to understand feminism.

• Contemporarity is about situating yourself in the new possibilities and opportunities that our world is offering us, based on the many struggles that women have engaged in since the dawn of patriarchal time. We cannot be told by the UN or by those who occupy the state, who we are and what our feminism is.
  • Patricia McFadden: Contemporarity And The Possibilities Of Building Alternative Societies (31 August 2021)

• This crisis of black survival is directly linked to the predation of big international pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations, which are mining the Black female body. We have become the latest and last capitalist frontier.
  • Talking about how Black Women, bodies are falling apart, and how they are wrecked by life-style diseases like diabetes, hypertension, viral infections and chronic inflammation of organs

• The whole idea of buying and selling Africans was a brutal exercise in dehumanizing us, and the societies that benefitted from this brutality have remained essentially slaving societies. Africans everywhere held onto the ancestral spiritual traditions and practices of humanism within the self and community – and the ties with those who came before – so as to survive the brutality of hatred.
  • Giving explanation on what slavery entails

• When you are born, you arrive on this planet with everything you need. It is inside you, you just have to explore it and bring it to the collective human project of freedom.
  • Lesson she learnt from Audre Lorde

• As females, we are under constant social and cultural surveillance. We are told that we belong to everybody else except to ourselves. This is the foundation of hetero normativity, and too many women have accepted this fraud.
  • Speaking on the reason why every woman owes herself a feminist identity and lifestyle.

• All humans have the capacity to experience pleasure, we have to understand its political significance and meanings. That is a feminist insight which we must return to, because in these contemporary societies that we live in, our bodies, our ideas, ourselves can become so easily commodified through the idea of pleasure as something that is for sale.
  • Her reply when asked if there a connection between pleasure and the concept of Contemporarity

• We need to think about globalization as being much more than structural adjustment policies by the World Bank, or the economic policies of the IMF which have devastated so many societies and lives; or just the financial infrastructure through which life becomes financialized on behalf of speculative capital which currently rules the world; the markets and all that.
  • Talking about the connection of the notion of contemporarity and the capture of Black women identities

• White people have to give up their race privilege. Otherwise, Black people will have to continue fighting racism, which is really a distraction from the crucial healing and recovery work that we need to do among and inside ourselves.
  • Her comparison of the building of self-sufficiency with racism
• When we fight racism, we create spaces which are quickly occupied by white people, because they are still not giving up their privilege.
  • Fighting racism, and her analysis on how it still favours the Whites

• As radical women we all come from traditions that minimize the individual because we understand that capitalism focuses on the individual, greed and accumulation.
  • Her reply when asked if building of self-sufficiency is capable of inspiring collective alternatives