While growing up, I went through a lot of challenges, I was lucky not to get damaged in the process. I could not speak up because of the fear that I would not be heard. Thus, I realized the societal norms in favor of the ideology of patriarchy which I see as being contributory factor to the gender binarism. My experience made me realize that patriarchy condones gender-based violence and sexual abuse because it involves male domination especially in the part of the world where I come from (Africa). This photo of mine projects my descent and color and the paint on my lips shows that I am a voice despite coming from my nationality that less respects the female gender. Though tears roll down my eyes each time I think of how backward my nationality is regarding gender issues, this is where women are still treated as ‘subject’ and ‘object’. My self-determination and advocacy made me create awareness to the people, especially females on empowerment programs and advocacy in the area of gender-based, sexual and family violence, but amazingly, the women being empowered and advocated for could not come out boldly and openly about it, mostly because of the fear of their husbands and others. I felt the gravity of women’s voicelessness in my country the day I was shunned by a well-positioned man for speaking up for women. As a feminist, these experiences have proven to me why we are still where we are today in the Gender world of knowledge. Where I come from, Feminists are mocked and called names such as, confused woman, single mother, divorced, lesbian, unmarried, untrained, and a ‘liar’, who has come to confuse other women with ‘unrealistic ideology’ which she does not practice. Now I hope for a resurgence in this new field and career I have chosen to pursue in the Western world.

In my personal narrative, I could relate with the first paragraph of Fiona MacDonald’s “Knocking down Walls in Political Science: In Defense of an Expansionist Feminist Agenda”, where she explained what Murphy said, that the state of Feminism, in contemporary society is bombarded with mixed messages and that it includes the notion(s) that feminism is ‘over’ or in ‘crises,’ that feminism is ‘scary’ and/or ‘irrelevant’; and that feminism has more ‘battles’ to fight. I also realized in the same book, her explanation of how Aronson 2003; O’Neill et al., pointed out that young women could not boldly come out to accept the label ‘feminist’ as part of their individual and and/or collective identity despite approving and supporting the term ‘feminist’. I believe the state of feminism is due to the colonial traits of the male gender, this can be traced to the source, our cultural beliefs and colonization. I could understand in “Engendering Political Science: An Immodest Proposal by Mary Hawkesworth” in 1997, that in contrast to narrow understandings of gender as cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, gender has an analytic category function as a heuristic device that illuminates areas for inquiry, frames questions for investigation, identifies puzzles in need of exploration, and provides concepts, definitions, and hypotheses to guide research. My experience has also emphasized the underrepresentation of women in elective and appointive offices due to the gender bias nature of the society, women are rendered voiceless, weak or as figureheads. It is also worthy of note that, in the profession (political science), there is an imbalance in the ratio of male to female in the profession, this is due to the intersectional nature of politics and institutions. According to research, gender related papers are placed on gender focused panels rather than including it as gendered thereby making research on women, gender and politics to be communicated within a small community of scholars even though gender mainstreaming has been cited as an objective of the discipline. This shows that gender and politics has not gained total acceptance widely, but we can still see progression in the Western world when compared to the third world countries where it is drastically lagging, and ‘feminism’ is still seen as a taboo.