Introduction

We decided to title this book (Un)thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa on the grounds of what Corlann Gee Bush (1983, p. 152) has argued, that the great strength of the women's movement (and of feminism) is the 'twin abilities to unthink the sources of oppression and to use this analysis to create a new synthesizing vision'. The strength of feminist scholarship is the dynamic process of unthinking, rethinking, energizing and transforming. To be able to unthink is to free existing knowledge of the assumptions that limit it and to create new liberating knowledge.