Womanhood and girlhood in twenty-first century middle class Kenya : disrupting patri-centered frameworks / Besi Brillian Muhonja.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Muhonja, Besi Brillian, author.

Series:

Critical African studies in gender and sexuality

Critical African Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Middle class women--Kenya--21st century.

Middle class women.

Women--Kenya--Social conditions--21st century.

Women.

Girls--Kenya--Social conditions--21st century.

Girls.

Social conditions.

Kenya.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 101 pages ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Womanhood and girlhood in 21st century middle class Kenya : disrupting patri-centered frameworks

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2018]

Summary:

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 restructuring family and society, recasting roles, and informing fresh conceptualizations of African girlhood and womanhood. Muhonja's interdisciplinary analysis and writing journeys through the different stages of girlhood and womanhood as ritualized by Kenya's twenty-first 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 Womanhood and Girlhood in Twenty-First Century Middle Class Kenya: Disrupting Patri-centered Frameworks 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Elective Lone Parenting, New Matrilines, and Matriarchies 1

2 Usichana wa Ubabi: Erasures of Ritual and the Myth of Independence 19

3 The Production of Bridehood 35

4 Wiring Bodies (Re)negotiating Selfhood 55

5 New Spaces, New Identities, New Languages 73.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-95) and index.

ISBN:

9781498534338

1498534333

OCLC:

1002121596