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sexuality

Just like couscous : Gender, agency and the politics of female circumcision in Cairo

Upphovsperson: Malmström, Maria Frederika
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Göteborg : University of Gothenburg
År: 2009
Ämnesord: anthropology, identity, gender, agency, embodiment, senses, body, sexuality, female circumcision, politics, Social change, performativity, practice, Political islam, Egypt, Middle East, North Africa
This dissertation explores how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, of which female circumcision is central. In order to do so, the study inquires into the lived experiences and social meanings of female circumcision and femininity as narrated by women from lower class neighbourhoods in Cairo. The study seeks to understand how the experiences of femininity and female circumcision are shaped and challenged by the social and political changes that impinge on these women’s lives. Female circumcision has become a global political minefield with ‘Western’ interventions affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. The global human rights discourse brings about change by portraying female circumcision as mutilation. These discourses and other political and social changes both in Egypt and elsewhere, such as modernization, the aftermath of 9/11 and regional instability have together begun to dis-embed female circumcision from its socio-cultural context. This thesis focuses upon the way in which these women understand and respond to these complex changes and it looks particularly at how different actors, in their construction of female identity, contest, resist, subvert or embrace female circumcision. The study explores how the subject is made through the interplay of global hegemonic structures of power and the most intimate sphere, which has been exposed in the international arena. The need to understand agency as the capacity to act according to the exigencies of the specific sociocultural forms the main premise of this dissertation; the Egyptian context comprises the complex interaction between the local and a variety of wider global forces.

The production of sexual mutilation among Muslim women in Cairo

Upphovsperson: Malmström, Maria Frederika
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Conflict, Displacement and Transformation | Taylor & Francis Online
År: 2013
Ämnesord: body, gender, embodiment, agency, female circumcision, Human rights, sexuality, desire
Female circumcision has become a global political minefield, with ‘Western’ interventions affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. As younger generation of women in Egypt informed by international human rights discourse begins to question norms still upheld by the previous generation, new dilemmas and tensions emerge. In this article, I discuss the risk that international interventions designed to modify local practices may fail when the local moral worlds in which such practices are embedded are inadequately understood. Rather than increasing women's agency, such interventions may reduce it and instead produce a sense of sexual mutilation among women.

Re-thinking sexualities in Africa

Medarbetare: Arnfred, Signe
Utgivare: Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2004
Ämnesord: Women, gender relations, sexuality, Culture, Ghana, Mali, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, Social anthropology, Socialantropologi
The volume brings together papers by African and Nordic/Scandinavian gender scholars and anthropologists, in attempts to investigate and critically discuss existing lines of thinking about sexuality in Africa, while at the same time creating space for alternative approaches. Issues of colonial and contemporary discourses on 'African sexuality' and on 'female genital mutilation' are being discussed, as well as issues of female agency and of feminists' engagement with HIV/AIDS. The volume contributes to contemporary efforts of re-thinking sexualities in the light of feminist, queer and postcolonial theory.

The cultural politics of female sexuality in South Africa

Upphovsperson: Gunkel, Henriette
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Nordiska Afrikainstitutet; Routledge
År: 2010
Ämnesord: sexuality, Homosexuality, Sexual behavior, Social identity, gender relations, Women's rights, legislation, Colonial influence, Post-apartheid, South Africa, Sociology, Sociologi
Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state’s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

Umleavyo : the dilemma of parenting

Medarbetare: Ntukula, Mary | Liljeström, Rita
Utgivare: Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2004
Ämnesord: Tanzania, parents, gender, generations, children, adolescents, sexuality, initiation, education, marriage, rites and ceremonies, customary law, modernization, child rearing, Sociology, Sociologi
Societies and families are changing all over the world. Less of what the older generations transmit of their experiences can be replicated by the younger generations in their own lives. What we are witnessing is a type of cultural delinking from past generations. Parents despair when their good intentions fail to have an effect and feel overwhelmed by circumstances they cannot control.The Reproductive Health Study Group linked to the University of Dar es Salaam published the first set of studies, Chelewa, Chelewa: The Dilemma of Teenage Girls, in 1994. The focus was on the teenage girl and the various reactions of the adult world to teenage out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The next set of studies, Haraka, Haraka: Look Before you Leap, appeared in 1998 and looked at the erosion of the customs that had regulated marriage, parenthood, and intergenerational obligations.This third and final report, Umleavyo: The Dilemma of Parenting, comprises studies on the generation gap and the ways in which this gap has widened over the past century. In these studies, the past serves as the seemingly stable background on which to project currently fluid and ambiguous parent-child relationships. The main focus of the studies is the different methods of, and goals for, bringing up the next generation. These include physical punishment; achieving compliance through fear and reference to supernatural forces; initiation ceremonies that provide multiple precautions and timely instruction on marriage and procreation; emphasis on relations between people as the most crucial experiences; and encouraging a sense of personal responsibility.The volume is based on the narratives of the grandparents, parents, and youths in the villages of the Pare people in the north and of the initiation leaders in Songea in the south, and on a comparison of the opinions of Nyakyusa elders and youths on gender issues. The central questions raised in the book are: How should one-support youths for whom there is no clear passage to full adulthood? And, how can one forge links between the plight of families and issues of citizenship and public action?

How to be a 'proper' woman in the time of AIDS

Upphovspersoner: Jassey, Katja | Nyanzi, Stella
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2007
Ämnesord: womens role, gender relations, feminism, sexuality, Hiv, aids, Social change, attitudes, information campaigns, behavioural sciences, South Africa, Uganda, Gambia, Sociology, Sociologi
How to Be a ‘Proper’ Women in the Time of AIDS is written as a piece of music for multiple voices. The voices of Katja Jassey and Stella Nyanzi – both professional women, both mothers, both anthropologists, one European, one African – are intertwined with the voices of other women (and men) telling about their lives coping with AIDS and/or struggling against the epidemic.  Personal storylines and interviews are interspersed with analytical reflections and a string of amazing photographs of African HIV/AIDS billboard posters, captured by Suzy Bernstein. Unconventional questions are posed: What kind of sexuality is portrayed in the anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns? Why is there such an absence of messages that would include or make sense to those living with HIV? What does it mean to be a ‘proper’ woman in the time of AIDS? The authors decided that instead of producing yet another publication citing the number of people infected, they would reflect on their own stories and professional experience, how they had come to think and react to HIV, and how their different positions influenced their understandings. By doing so they manage to create new insights and open new perspectives. They don’t say what is right and wrong. They say stop! Stop awhile and think about yourselves. Stop and think for yourselves.