War of Symbols and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy: The Case of Joice Mujuru

The experiences of Joice Mujuru, one of the most accomplished woman politicians in Zimbabwe, demonstrate that dominant sites of meaning production play a significant role in influencing women’s ability to claim political legitimacy. At the height of her career, Joice Mujuru was touted as an exceptional liberation war hero in the dominant state-controlled media. Her image as a liberation war hero enabled her to claim political legitimacy because the ruling party and its leaders mainly justify their political authority by emphasising their roles in liberating Zimbabwe from colonial rule. She climbed up the hierarchical structures within the ruling ZANU-PF party and government until she was potentially next in line to become the country’s president. However, in 2014 she was accused of plotting to topple the then-president, Robert Mugabe, and was expelled from the party and fired from her position as the country’s vice president. The state-controlled media then claimed that her much-publicized liberation war exploits were mainly fictional, especially her widely acclaimed shooting of an enemy helicopter during the liberation war. Her political ascent was then primarily attributed to her sexual relationships with powerful men like her late husband, Solomon Mujuru. In defending herself from this onslaught, Joice Mujuru could only use social media platforms, independent media, and media platforms outside Zimbabwe. This paper focuses on the post-2014 period and combines a cultural studies approach, a political economy approach and curious feminism to explore Mujuru’s struggle to reclaim her political legitimacy. The cultural studies approach deconstructs texts to strip away the taken-for-grantedness of meaning. The political economy approach focuses on how power dynamics influence how people construct meanings within a productive process. Combining cultural studies and political economy approaches helps to incorporate a critical review that embeds texts within their context of production. Curious feminism adds to this the questioning of constructions of masculinised and feminised meanings in order to move away from considering the status quo as ‘common sense’. I pay attention to the intersection of patriarchal oppression and women’s resistance in the war of symbols, that is, the struggles over meaning production, to provide a more complex view of women’s struggle for political legitimacy. I argue that, although alternative media platforms that are outside the control of the state or that exist on the margins of political power may sometimes be effective in disseminating political messages, they may not be as effective for women whose gender places them in precarious positions within national politics where they lack access to robust media networks that will vigorously support their political interests and push their political agendas to the broader population.