„My nevydávame ženskú literatúru”
“We don’t publish women’s literature”

Censorship and auto-censorship of writing by women in Uganda

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes cultural prejudices faced by women writers in Uganda since their belatedentry into Ugandan literature in the 1990s, facilitated by the non-governmental literaryorganization FEMRITE. The censorship discussed is not official or institutional, but is part oftraditional cultural discourses about women. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1998) theorizationof implicit censorship present in the social regulation of discourse and her term foreclosure,the article analyzes the ways in which this censorships works to create norms of constructinga social and political female subject. It is created, on the one hand, by an atmosphere of trivializingwomen’s experience (which simultaneously masks and normalizes patriarchal violenceagainst women) and on the other by perceiving fiction as personal confession, i.e., overvaluingits meaning. The article shows that despite the explicit feminist orientation of FEMRITEpublications, these texts often reveal the authors’ internalization of traditional patriarchal discourses.

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