Intersectionality in African digital organizing: a Ghanaian perspective Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed 1,2, * 1 College of Journalism & Mass Communication, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 2 Department of Communication Science, University of the Free State, QwaQwa Campus, Phuthaditjhaba, Republic of South Africa *Corresponding author: Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed. Email: wunpini@uga.edu Abstract Although there is growing scholarship on intersectionality in African feminist movements, there are still gaps in scholarship on intersectionality on the continent when it comes to various identity categories. I examine intersectionality within the Ghanaian context using African feminisms as a backdrop. I argue that to drive African feminisms toward emancipatory praxes, it is imperative to center identity categories that are often erased from feminist conversations and to pay attention to organizing from these margins to amplify the erased narratives about marginalization. I theorize these silenced narratives drawing on my experiences as a Muslim Dagbana woman and my work in African and Ghanaian feminist digi- tal spaces. Here, I focus on ethnicity as an identity category that is often overlooked within feminist discourses in national contexts in Africa. I point to organizing strategies that can facilitate the centering of identities and feminist issues that have historically been pushed to the margins. Keywords: feminism, cultural identity, ethnicity, gender activism, marginalization Although intersectionality has seen wide interest in African feminist scholarship and praxis in recent times (Tamale, 2020), a cursory overview of scholarship over the decades demon- strates that theorizing and organizing from an intersectionality framework has been a part of the feminist landscape on the continent (Alidou, 2013; Ekine & Abbas, 2013). Scholars and activists may not have necessarily articulated their work using this exact language but they had some sensibilities pointing to the usefulness of understanding the matrix of oppressions that many women experience in a colonialist patriarchal world. Some of the organizing and scholarship which focused on addressing the needs of women in rural communities under- stood that these women’s lived experience was shaped not just by their gender but also by their geographical location and sometimes socio-economic class (Bowles, 2021). Although there is a growth in African feminist scholarship that explicitly employs intersectionality as a framework for understanding the matrix of oppression, much like in U.S. Black feminist move- ments, some African feminists were already theorizing from intersectional frameworks. Indeed, Black feminists like Crenshaw (1989) have not only provided the language to fur- ther understanding about the multiplicity of oppression and how it intertwines with structural systems, they also have built the foundations for feminists to create a coherent body of work around intersectionality. Despite the existence of some intersectional sensibilities in African social movements, more work needs to be done by feminist movements especially in West Africa and Ghana when it comes to centering various marginalized identities such as sexuality, disability, class, ethnicity, and religion. Much of feminist organizing and scholarship has focused on gender without necessarily paying attention to the ways in which many women are multiply marginalized (Mohammed, 2022a; Tamale, 2020). For instance, there has not been enough interest in theorizing how gender identity intersects with sexuality, meaning that issues affecting LGBTQIþ peo- ple on the continent are not only pushed further to the mar- gins but are also not handled with the care that they deserve (Mohammed, 2022b). While intersectionality is gaining wide visibility in Ghanaian feminist spaces and has been used by a few feminist groups to guide their praxis, there persists an un- derstanding of intersectionality that is watered down and that does not take into account how the framework can be used to build radical liberatory futures. For example, the category of ethnicity is often erased from discussions on intersectionality in many movement spaces. In addition, a lot of unpacking needs to be done to understand how the matrices of gender, religion, and disability are also erased from feminist organiz- ing work. Therefore, intersectionality as an analytical, theo- retical, and praxis tool is useful for highlighting the silenced histories and narratives in Ghanaian social movements (Mohammed, 2022a). My use of intersectionality in this arti- cle builds on the work done by U.S. Black feminists such as Kimberle ´ Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins and African fem- inists like Sylvia Tamale. When I draw on intersectionality to apply to the African context, I utilize the framework to decon- struct identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, disability, sex- uality, and religion among others. Here, I specifically utilize intersectionality to theorize ethnicity, an undertheorized iden- tity category in many African feminist movements using Ghana as the focus. In this article, I argue that to drive African feminisms to- ward emancipatory praxes, it is imperative to center identity categories that are often erased from feminist conversations and to pay attention to organizing from these margins to am- plify the erased narratives about marginalization in African Received: 13 March 2023. Revised: 17 March 2023. Accepted: 19 March 2023 V C The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Communication, Culture and Critique, 2023, 00, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcad007 Forum Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ccc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ccc/tcad007/7110945 by University of Georgia user on 08 April 2023