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Abstract Sistren2 are partners in the development and maintenance of the Rastafari movement despite scholarly refusal to engage with balanced gender narratives. This refusal reinforces patriarchal notions that sistren have nothing significant to contribute to overstanding3 Rastafari livity, philosophy or other world phenomena. Increased scholarly engagement with the intellectual contributions and livitical practices of sistren will allow balanced narratives of the movement to come to the fore, deepen our overstanding of Rastafari philosophy and livity and help rectify existing patriarchy within the livity.
Keywords * Woman * sistren * androcentrism * omega balance * gender balance * patriarchy
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Sistren are partners in the development and maintenance of the Rastafari movement despite scholarly refusal to engage with balanced gender narratives. In the epigraph to this essay, Rastafari woman scholar Jahzani Kush points out the implications of the lengthy omission of woman in Rastafari studies. Sistren4 have had to struggle not only with patriarchy within the movement, but also against androcentric scholarship produced about the movement. I focus on the Rastafari movement, not because it is exceptional in terms of patriarchy and male-centred scholarship, but because literature in the field continues to elide the organizational capacity and philosophical contributions of sistren. Scholarly engagement with balanced gender narratives in the Garvey,5 Negritude,6 Communist,7 Black Power8 and other movements has transformed and enhanced our knowledge of the history of Black resistance and resilience. With only a handful of articles, a few dissertations, and even fewer published books about sistren, woman in Rastafari are virtually rendered invisible in studies of Black women's activism, Rastafari studies and Pan-Africanist discourses.
A few questions to ponder while reading this piece are: 1) What role do researchers play in the perpetual silencing and erasure of sistren and whose purpose does this erasure serve? 2) How are research methods (research questions, selection of respondents, coding data, writing and analysis) influenced by a focus on masculine narratives? Some researchers have mentioned that sistren refused to be interviewed by them or that they found it more difficult to interview sistren (Christensen 2014, 142). If sistren refuse to participate in academic research, what is the impetus behind their refusal, and if they are hard to find, where are they? These methodological and epistemological issues should be...