You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.
Images and stories about African sexuality abound in today's globalized media. Frequently old stereotypes and popular opinion inform these stories, and sex in the media is predominately approached as a problem in need of solutions and intervention. The authors gathered here refuse an easy characterization of African sexuality and instead seek to understand the various erotic realities, sexual practices, and gendered changes taking place across the continent. They present a nuanced and comprehensive overview of the field of sex and sexuality in Africa to serve as a guide though the quickly expanding literature. This collection offers a set of texts that use sexuality as a prism for studying how communities coalesce against the canvas of larger political and economic contexts and how personal lives evolve therein. Scholars working in Africa, the U.S., and Europe reflect on issues of representation, health and bio-politics, same-sex relationships and identity, transactional economies of sex, religion and tradition, and the importance of pleasure and agency. This multidimensional reader provides a comprehensive view of sexuality from an African perspective.
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.
In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. Love in Africa seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from th...
This innovative anthropological study, based on biographic narratives recorded during extensive field-research in Darfur, Sudan (1990-95) provides a unique understanding of how, in daily life, working women of different classes negotiate their identities in the context of an Islamist regime.
Examining ADHD and its social and medical treatments around the world. Attention deficithyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been a common psychiatric diagnosis in both children and adults since the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. But the diagnosis was much less common—even unknown—in other parts of the world. By the end of the twentieth century, this was no longer the case, and ADHD diagnosis and treatment became an increasingly widespread global phenomenon. As the diagnosis was adopted around the world, the definition and treatment of ADHD often changed in the context of different psychiatric professions, medical systems, and cultures. Global Perspectives on ADHD is the first book t...
Featuring contributions from some of the most accomplished scholars on the topic, Holding the World Together explores the rich and varied ways in which women have wielded power across the African continent, from the precolonial period to the present. Suitable for classroom use, this comprehensive volume considers such topics as the representation of African women, their role in national liberation movements, their experiences of religious fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), their incorporation into the world economy, changing family and marriage systems, impacts of the world economy on their lives and livelihoods, and the unique challenges they face in the areas of health and disease. Contributors: Nwando Achebe, Ousseina Alidou, Signe Arnfred, Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois, Henryatta Ballah, Teresa Barnes, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Emily Burril, Abena P. A. Busia, Gracia Clark, Alicia Decker, Karen Flint, December Green, Cajetan Iheka, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Elizabeth M. Perego, Claire Robertson, Kathleen Sheldon, Aili Mari Tripp, Cassandra Veney
The self-identifying Ghanaian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands are deeply impacted by religious beliefs and cultural factors in their approach towards sexual health practices, well-being and pleasure. This book shows how religious sensibilities shape the physical activities, beauty practices, and gendered roles that are adopted into the daily lives of these communities in pursuit of their sexual and general well-being. Through an ethnographic account, it explores and challenges the assumptions held around the complex relationship between religion and sexuality.
How do concepts such as ‘the body’, ‘intimacy’, ‘adventure’ and ‘intersectionality‘ shape our engagement with gender history? In this 40th anniversary edition of the Yearbook we revisit the question how concepts ‘live’ in gender research practices and what it means to ‘do’ gender history in 2021. Contributors include experienced researchers who have spent years, sometimes decades, contemplating the conceptual background of their work as well as scholars who have come to the field more recently and who therefore provide a different insight. As such this Yearbook shows how certain concepts travel within academic culture across the Low Countries, revealing not so much the theoretical underpinnings of the field, but rather how these theoretical underpinnings find a home in individual research practices and may be used in surprising ways.
Examining the impacts of global development processes and HIV response on queer politics and activism in Ghana