Artivism and the Gendered Politics of Memory: (Re)Writing and (Re)Righting Zimbabwe’s Political Project

Zimbabwe’s political trajectory over the past four decades has been marked by recurrent violence with profound consequences for women. Efforts to resolve these conflicts have largely been dominated by male actors, reinforcing a political landscape framed as a men’s domain. Similarly, dominant narratives of Zimbabwe’s violent history have marginalized women’s voices, erasing their lived experiences and embodied traumas. This paper interrogates how Zimbabwean women, through social movements, identify, relate, and imagine their being as survivors within a repressive state. Drawing on research-creation methodologies that integrate qualitative inquiry with artistic expression, the study curates women’s histories and foregrounds their embodied realities. By treating women’s movements as sites of resistance to hegemonic masculinities and spaces for re-engaging contested memories, the paper offers an intersectional analysis of the multidimensional traumas borne by women and explores the creative avenues through which they (re)construct visions of a peaceful society.