Dr Kathomi Gatwiri

This book explores the Afro-diasporic experiences of African skilled migrants in Australia. It explores research participants' experiences of migration and how these experiences inform their lives and the lives of their family. It provides theory-based arguments examining how mainstream immigration attitudes in Australia impact upon Black African migrants through the mediums of mediatised moral panics about Black criminality and acts of everyday racism that construct and enforce their 'strangerhood'.

The book presents theoretical writing on alternate African diasporic experiences and identities and the changing nature of such identities. The qualitative study employed semi-structured interviews to investigate multiple aspects of the migrant experience including employment, parenting, family dynamics and overall sense of belonging. This book advances our understanding of the resilience exercised by skilled Black African migrants as they adjust to a new life in Australia, with particular implications for social work, public health and community development practices.

At the heart of this research, in which this case study is founded, are 30 Kenyan women’s accounts of their experiences of living with vaginal fistulas and the ways in which they have survived such a debilitating condition. The purpose of this case study is to show the methodological aspect of a 3-year-long thesis construction. I discuss the qualitative research, most especially phenomenology and critical feminism, and elucidate how these two perspectives are used in understanding lived experiences. Using an African feminist lens alongside phenomenology takes up not only an individual but also a collective, political stance in raising critical questions about why women in the “third world,” with few material resources, little education, and lower social standing, are more susceptible to developing vaginal fistulas. More simply, I investigated how gender, class, and ethnicity intersect and affect the quality of life they (are forced to) live. My aim is to understand how Black Kenyan women interpret their lived experiences of vaginal fistulas, with a view of reflecting on gender, cultural, and systemic oppression and its significance to women’s well-being, and the possible systems and policy changes needed to better redress vaginal fistulas in the future. In an attempt to create a conceptual theorizing of the phenomenon of living with vaginal fistulas, I discuss how data were collected through a phenomenological approach and analyzed through a critical African feminist lens.

This book reveals the structures of poverty, power, patriarchy and imperialistic health policies that underpin what the World Health Organization calls the “hidden disease” of vaginal fistulas in Africa. By employing critical feminist and post-colonial perspectives, it shows how “leaking black female bodies” are constructed, ranked, stratified and marginalised in global maternal health care, and explains why women in Africa are at risk of developing vaginal fistulas and then having adequate treatment delayed or denied. Drawing on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 30 Kenyan women, it paints a rare social portrait of the heartbreaking challenges for Kenyan women living with this most profound gender-related health issue – an experience of shame, taboo and abjection with severe implications for women’s wellbeing, health and sexuality. In absolutely groundbreaking depth, this book shows why research on vaginal fistulas must incorporate feminist understandings of bodily experience to inform future practices and knowledge.