Full Description
Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Hip and ambitious in Nairobi
Conceiving sexuality
Interfaces of pleasure and anxiety
Structure of the book
PART I: THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY
Sexuality research in Kenya
Health approaches to sexuality
Sexuality research in the context of AIDS in Africa
The dynamics of sexuality: the focus of this study
Anthropology and sexuality
The social construction of sexuality, and its limits
Sex as embodied experience
Historicising sexuality
Methodological aspects of sexuality research
Researching sex and sexuality: research places and practices
Researching sex and sexuality: collection and validity of data
An unmarried with partner, non-Kenyan, white female young professional
PART II: YOUNG PROFESSIONALS: EMBLEMS OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Sexuality and societal transformations
Gender and sexuality in colonial times
Gender and sexuality in postcolonial times
Social transformation and moral anxiety
The young and ambitious in Nairobi
Classifying young professionals
Hesitations about ethnicity and issues of belonging
Living independently and single
Nightlife and dating
Young urban professionals and the formation of a contemporary identity
Explorers of a modern identity
Young professionals' position towards customary ways of living
'Westernization'
Africanness
Conclusion
PART III: SOCIETY IN FLAMES: SEXUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF AIDS
AIDS as a context of life
Africanist perspectives on AIDS and sexuality
Policies of the government and nongovernmental organizations
The definition of 'risk groups'
The medicalization of sexuality
Christian perceptions of AIDS and sexuality
The remoralization of sexuality
Sexuality and contemporary lifestyles
AIDS as the disease of 'immorality'
The public emergence of the intimate
Intimacy as part of lifestyle
Conclusion
PART IV: AMBIGUOUS PLEASURES: SEXUAL DESIRE, CAREER, AND FEMININITY
Female sexuality in Nairobi, Kenya and beyond
Pamela, Martha, Njeri, Tayiani and Dorcas
The importance of dating
'Playing hard to get'
To give and to receive sexual pleasure
Chastity and the realization of sexual pleasure
Boundaries of sexual pleasure
Between sexual allure and limited availability
Appropriating sexual pleasure
Sexual pleasure and conventional expectations
Communicating ambiguity
Embodying transformations
Conclusion
PART V: AMBIGUOUS PLEASURES: SEX, RICHES AND MASCULINITY
Male sexuality in Nairobi society, Kenya and beyond
Alex, Eric, Tom, Maurice and Ongeri
Men's sexual début
Circumcision as constitutive to masculinity
Sex as a skill—being a 'good lover'
Love in relation to sexual drive
Sex and having 'arrived'
Moving between sexual prowess and restrained potency
Sexual desire as a physical craving
Balancing too much and too little sex
The waning dominant patriarchal ideology
Accommodating change
Conclusion
PART VI: SIGN OF THE TIMES: MEDIA AND THE THERAPEUTIC ETHOS OF ROMANTIC LOVE
Romantic love and the twin spheres of consumption and mass media
Representing romantic love: films, television and advertisements
Television
Advertising
The privileging of the image
The manifestations of romantic love: music
Practicing romantic love: dating
Practices of mediation: magazines
The therapeutic discourse on relationships
Sign of the times: imaginations and practices of romantic love versus 'westernization', or the perils of modernity
Conclusion
CONCLUSION: SEXUALITY AND ITS AMBIGUOUS PLEASURES
Researching sexuality in Africa
The pleasures and anxieties of sexuality
Middle-class lifestyles and self-perceptions
Sex and sophistication - self and embodiment
Bibliography
Index
