(Un)translatable feminisms? Language, resistance and the Southern African lexicon of struggle

This article explores the limits and politics of feminist translation from the epistemic South, positioning Southern Africa as a critical site from which to rethink how feminist vocabularies travel, sediment, or resist across borders. Using critical discourse analysis and interpretive readings of Southern African feminist literature, policy frameworks, activist media, and oral traditions expressed in Southern African English and Nguni languages, it examines the translational frictions that emerge when dominant feminist terms such as gender mainstreaming, empowerment, and intersectionality enter local policy and activist spaces. The paper argues that these frictions reveal both the asymmetries of global feminist knowledge production and the creative rearticulations of local feminist vocabularies that exceed the limits of translation. Rather than treating untranslatability as failure, we read it as a productive site of negotiation that unsettles institutionalised tendencies towards universalisation within global feminist circulation. Through a decolonial feminist lens, we foreground Southern African women’s speech, writing, and activism as theoretical practices that do not merely receive feminist concepts but actively reshape the politics of translation itself.