Download or read book Womanhood and Girlhood in Twenty First Century Middle Class Kenya written by Besi Brillian Muhonja and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of twenty first century girlhoods and womanhoods charts a new area of scholarship on Kenya. The chapters investigate questions related to how new rituals of girlhood and womanhood that materialize when religious, indigenous, and foreign worlds encounter each other are re-structuring family and society, recasting roles, and informing fresh conceptualizations of African girlhood and womanhood. The author’s interdisciplinary analysis and writing journeys through the different stages of girlhood and womanhood as ritualized by Kenya’s 21st century middle class, and teases out the implications of these peculiarities to identity (re)creation and the restructuring of societies’ organs, and traditionally gendered institutions. Applying a critical African studies lens, the arguments in this book center women as originators of action and thought without inquiring into a male other. Essentially, this work disrupts patri-centered constructions and examinations of female bodies and identities. The resulting deductions inform on the substratum of Kenyan girls and women’s self-definitions as manifest through their experiences and ritualized practices, and articulate the impact of the performances of these bodies and identities on Kenyan and global societies.

Download or read book Womanhood and Girlhood in Twenty first Century Middle Class Kenya written by Besi Brillian Muhonja and published by Critical African Studies in Gender and Sexuality. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of Kenya's middle class demonstrates how contemporary social performances of femaleness are disrupting and complicating conceptions of gender and gendered identities and institutions. This book will alter scholarship of female gender identity in Kenya, forcing the creation of new, responsive action for African girls and women.

Download or read book Cabo Verdean Women Writing Remembrance Resistance and Revolution written by Terza A. Silva Lima-Neves and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cabo Verdean Women Writing Remembrance, Resistance, and Revolution: Kriolas Poderozas documents the work and stories told by Cabo Verdean women to refocus the narratives about Cabo Verde on Cabo Verdean women and their experiences. The contributors examine their own experiences, the history of Cabo Verde, and Cabo Verdean diaspora to highlight the commonalities that exist among all women of African descent, such as sexual and domestic violence and media objectification, as well as the different meanings these commonalities can hold in local contexts. Through exploring the literary and musical contributions of Cabo Verdean women, the Cabo Verdean state and its transnational relations, food and cooking traditions, migration and diaspora, and the oral histories of Cabo Verde, the contributors analyze themes of community, race, sexuality, migration, gender, and tradition.

Download or read book Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies written by Besi Brillian Muhonja and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies: Centering the Human and the Humane in Critical Studies, edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye, contributors explore the application of ubuntu/utu responsive perspectives and methods to critical studies. Through the lens of ubuntu/utu, the contributors to this Kenya-focused volume draw from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, media studies, and development studies, among others, to demonstrate the urgency and necessity of humane scholarship/research in gender and queer studies. By centering decolonial approaches and the human and humane, concentrating on subjects and identities that have been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive. They advance within Kenyan studies themes and elements of alternative, non-binary, variant, and non-heteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices, as well as approaches to doing knowledge. Underscoring the timeliness of such a text is evidence rendered in sections of the collection highlighting the significance of ubuntu/utu-centric scholarship. Challenging the erasure of the human in academic works, the chapters in this volume look inward and locate the voices and experiences of Kenyan peoples as the pivotal locus of analysis and epistemological derivation.

Download or read book Women and the Nigeria Biafra War written by Gloria Chuku and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970) through the lens of gender explores the valiant and gallant ways women carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and immediate postwar Nigeria. The book presents women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency, who demonstrated remarkable resilience and initiative, waging war on all fronts in the face of precarious conditions and scarcities, and maximizing opportunities occasioned by the hostilities. Women’s experiences are highlighted through critical analyses of oral interviews, memoirs, life histories, fashion and material culture, international legal conventions, music, as well as governmental and non-governmental sources. The book fills the gap in the war scholarship that has minimized women’s complex experiences fifty years after the hostilities ended. It highlights the cost of the conflict on Nigerian women, their participation in the hostilities, and their contributions to the survival of families, communities and the country. The chapters present counter-narratives to fictional and nonfictional accounts of the war, especially those written by men, which often peripheralize or stereotypically represent women as passive spectators or helpless victims of the conflict; and also highlight and exaggerate women’s moral laxity and sensationalize their marital infidelities.

Download or read book Negotiating Identities in Contemporary Africa written by Toyin Falola and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume provides an interdisciplinary and balanced discussion on the changing dynamics of identities in Africa, with a focus on gender, ethno-cultural, and religious identity.

Download or read book Narrative Identity and Ethics in Postcolonial Kenya written by Eleanor Tiplady Higgs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a Christian organization with colonial roots work towards reproductive justice for Kenyan women and resist sexist interpretations of Christianity? How does a women's organization in Africa navigate controversial ethical dilemmas, while dealing with the pressures of imperialism in international development? Based on a case study of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Kenya, this book explores the answers to these questions. It also introduces a theoretical framework drawn from postcolonial feminist critique, narrative identity theory and the work of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians: 'everyday Christian ethics'. The book evaluates the theory's implications as a cross-disciplinary theme in feminist studies of religion and theology. Eleanor Tiplady Higgs argues that Kenya YWCA's narratives of its Christian history and constitution sustain a link between its ethical perspective and its identity. The ethical insights that emerge from these practices proclaim the relevance of the value of 'fulfilled lives', as prescribed in the New Testament, for Christian women's experiences of reproductive injustice.

Download or read book Gender and Education in Kenya written by Esther Mukewa Lisanza and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Education in Kenya explores the intersections of curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and gender. The contributors study depictions of gender in textbooks, the presence and roles of girls and women within classrooms in Kenya, and female leadership in education, arguing that, despite recent policies put in place by the Kenyan government to ensure gender parity in education, there is still a need to make curriculum more gender responsive. Gender and Education in Kenya examines the disparity between male and female representation in education and advocate for more training for teachers about gender-related educational policies and implementing gender-responsive objectives in classrooms. The collection concludes with a study of the intersection of gender and disability with a chapter that explores the additional challenges for a blind girl in school and the lack of policies in place to help disabled students.

Download or read book Mothers and Schooling written by Fibian Lukalo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book opens new horizons in understanding educational decision-making and how schooling patterns are shaped by, and reshape, rural communities. It provides a humane portrait of the struggles faced by mothers in rural Kenya to educate their children, despite the ‘free education policy’. Based on a prize-winning study examining mothers’ attitudes to education in a rural Kenyan community, this vividly nuanced ethnographic work draws upon African feminist perspectives to describe the livelihoods and aspirations of 32 mothers responsible for over 180 children. It explores the effects of mothers’ school histories and the constraining effects of land practices and patriarchal culture on their actions. Their school choice and engagement strategies reflect different facilitating environments, their educational values, the use of social mothering practices and reliance on kinship reciprocity. The findings illustrate the importance of recognising the diversity of mothers’ situations within this small community and the pressures they face to be ‘good mothers’ who school their children. Mothers and Schooling highlights the importance of mothers’ educational agency and is essential reading for anthropologists of education, those working in gender studies, poverty alleviation strategists, educational researchers, teachers and policy-makers who wish to improve the success of Education for All for the children of women living in Southern rural poverty.

Download or read book Queer Objects to the Rescue written by George Paul Meiu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-12-13 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya. Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity. In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.

Download or read book Gender Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya s Transitions to Democracy written by Lyn Ossome and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critiquing the valorization of democracy as a means of containing violence and stabilizing political contestation, this book draws links between the democratization process and sexual/gendered violence observed against women during electioneering periods in Kenya. The book shows the contradictory relationship between democracy and gendered violence as being largely influenced in the first instance by the capitalist interests vested in the colonial state and its imperative to exploit laboring women; secondly, in the nature of the postcolonial state and politics largely captured by ethnic, bourgeois class interests; and third, influenced by neoliberal political ideology that has remained largely disarticulated from women's structural positions in Kenyan society. It argues that colonial capitalist interests established certain patterns of gender exploitation that extended into the postcolonial period such that the indigenous bourgeoisie took the form of an ethnicized elite. Ethnicity shaped politics and neoliberal political ideology further blocked women’s integration into politics in substantive ways. It concludes that it is not so much the norms and values of liberal democracy that assist in understanding women’s exclusion, but rather the structural dynamics that have shaped women’s experiences of democratic politics. In this way, gender violence in the context of democratization and electoral violence with its gendered manifestation can be fully understood as deeply embedded in the history of the structural dynamics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchalism in Kenya.

Download or read book Through the Gender Lens written by Funmi Soetan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable development is now intricately linked not just to economic growth, but more importantly, to the quality of life of people in terms of their social status, political participation, cultural freedom, environmental justice and inclusive development. For previously colonized nations like Nigeria, these linkages are believed to have been influenced by the legacies of colonial rule, positively or otherwise. Through the Gender Lens: A Century of Social and Political Development in Nigeria looks at how colonialism has enabled or hindered the roles of the state in promoting inclusive development in general, and gender equality, in particular, in the process of nation building. In this edited volume, scholars analyze a host of policies, strategies and programs, as well as empirical evidence, to expose how types of governance — from direct colonial rule in the country from 1914, through her independence in 1960, a Republic in 1963, and to different post-independence governance periods — have influenced gender relations, and the impacts of these on Nigerian women. Diverse sectoral perspectives from education, health, culture, environment, and especially politics, are presented to explain the level of attainment (or otherwise) of gender equality and the implications for Nigeria’s road to sustainable development. The emphasis on the role of the state in development particularly indicts the social and political domains of governance. Hence, the main focus of inquiry in the volume. In its twelve chapters, the authors analyze available data and other information to draw relevant conclusions, identify lessons of experience, including from some cross-country comparisons, and make concrete recommendations for more gender-inclusive systems of governance in the next century of Nigeria’s nationhood.

Download or read book Gender and Development in Nigeria written by Funmi Soetan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this edited volume, Nigerian scholars from a variety of disciplines examine the relationship between gender and Nigeria’s pathways of development in the last 100 years of its nationhood. This analysis is set against the background of unequal power dynamics between women and men, and specifically the ways in which social, cultural, political, and economic construction of gender has influenced Nigeria’s course of development through her colonial and post-colonial history. The influence of the nature of economic governance, policy, and institutional frameworks, the nature of resource availability and (re)distribution between women and men in terms of goods and services, knowledge and skills, policies and budgets, and the outcomes and impacts for women and men are seen in terms of women’s economic empowerment, equal participation and development benefits. This rich collection of empirical works therefore provides not just the rhetoric but the evidence to indict gender power relations in Nigeria, especially at the institutional level. This volume unpacks and explores this recurrent problem with a the goal of identifying new pathways for gender relations.

Download or read book Child Rape in Ghana written by Martha Donkor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the etiology of child rape in Ghana within the framework of rape culture. By applying feminist perspectives and psychological theories to laws in Ghana to protect children against sexual abuse, this book creates room for both victims and perpetrators to tell their stories while also incorporating the views of the public through a textual analysis of reader comments on child rape in the nation’s newspapers. The presentation of both victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives is done with the goal of drawing attention to the pervasiveness of child rape in Ghanaian society and to provide a lens through which we can detect potentially dangerous situations that can lead to child molestation in our homes and communities, revealing lapses in social organization and interactions that make child rape possible.

Download or read book Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies written by Babacar M'Baye and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-10 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, and development studies, among others, Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies demonstrates the urgency and necessity of new research in gender and queer studies in and on Senegalese societies. By focusing on subjects that have thus far been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive, centering within Senegalese studies themes and elements of alternative, nonbinary, variant, and nonheteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices. Contributors demonstrate that nationalist and anticolonial discourses propelled by deep and lingering socioeconomic inequalities have led, in postcolonial Senegal, to vitriolic scapegoating of individuals and communities with variant sexual and gender identities. The chapters in this volume look inward to the voices and experiences of the Senegalese people to challenge nationalist representations of advocacy for the liberation of gender and sexual minorities in Senegal as a function of a Western neocolonialist agenda.

Download or read book Youth Culture and the Media written by Bill Osgerby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This expansive, lively introduction charts the connections between international youth cultures and the development of global media and communication. From 1950s drive-ins and jukeboxes to contemporary social media, the book examines modern youth cultures in their social, economic, and political contexts. Exploring the rise of young people as a distinct media market, the book examines the relation of youth to modern consumerism, marketing, and digital technologies. The chapters are packed with analysis of media representations of youth, debates about the media’s 'effects' on young audiences, and young people’s use of the media to elaborate identities and negotiate social relationships. Drawing on a wealth of international examples, the book explores the impact of globalisation and new media technologies on youth cultures around the world. Assessing a profusion of worldwide research, the book shows how modern youth cultures can only be understood as part of an international web of connections, exchanges, and experiences. With an ideal balance between detailed examples and engaging analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in youth cultures and the modern media.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Kenya written by Wanjala S. Nasong'o and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-27 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a bold attempt to address a comprehensive range of themes and issues relating to contemporary Kenya. It covers independent Kenya’s history, society, culture, economics, politics, and environment with great breadth and depth, comprising thirty-four chapters divided into three parts. Part I focuses on independence and the political economy of development, followed by Part II on environment, globalization, gender, and society. Part III examines the external context’s impact and implications for Kenya and the role of Kenya in the global political economy.