Review of Pumla Dineo Gqola’s Female Fear Factory

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.2.0077
• Published date: 23 September 2022
• Date: 23 September 2022
• Pages: 77-80
• Author: Jamie Martin
• Subject Matter: Female Fear Factory (book),gender-based violence,rape,non-fiction,Pumla Dineo Gqola (author)

Review of Pumla Dineo Gqola’s

Female Fear Factory

Jamie Martin

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

Pumla Dineo Gqola, Female Fear Factory

Cape Town, South Africa: Melinda Ferguson Books, 2021. 223 pages.

ISBN: 978-1990973093

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the book

Female Fear Factory

(2021) by Pumla Dineo Gqola.

An overview and evaluation of the book are provided, emphasising the important

deepening of the central concept and its relevance to anti-rape and feminist work,

activism and scholarship across the world.

KEYWORDS

Female Fear Factory

(book); gender-based violence; rape; non-fiction; Pumla Dineo

Gqola (author)

Female Fear Factory is another timely and critical contribution to Pumla Dineo Gqola’s

already deep feminist oeuvre. She has earned her place as one of South Africa’s greatest

feminist thinkers, and with good reason. Gqola’s ability to articulate the ways patriarchy

infects and inflicts violence, capturing both the brutality and possibilities of freedom, ena-

ble her to think through rape and gendered violence in novel and important ways. Such

thinking and articulation make possible different ways of understanding and addressing the

very real and urgent concern of ongoing patriarchal violence in a context like South Africa.

Importantly, Gqola has expanded the geographical and contextual realms in her most

current book, opening up not only the applicability of her insights beyond the borders of

South Africa, but also further opening up channels of solidarity and transnational feminist

work. In her previous book, Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015), which is the starting

point for her thinking on the concept of the Female Fear Factory, she squarely stays within

the bounds of South Africa. There, she unpacks centuries of history, from slavery and early

DOI:10.13169/INTECRIT DIVESTUD.4.2.0077