Gender And Sexuality In Ghanaian Societies

Gender and Sexuality in Ghanaian Societies explores cultural dynamics embedded in the interstices of agency, vulnerability, and power within patriarchal structures that seek to regulate the sexual lives of women in Ghana. Emphasizing the centrality of gender as a motive force for sexual expression, the book stresses that contemporary Ghanaian women's sexual expressions are caught at the intersection of traditional gender expectations of heteronormativity and women’s perceptions of how heteronormativity should operate in their lives. The book's emphasis on women's agency is significant because it highlights a flaw in earlier, Western accounts of African women's lives under Africa's special brand of patriarchy that held women in total subjection to men. Gender and Sexuality debunks that trope and presents Ghanaian women's dynamism, resilience, and vulnerabilities embedded in the diverse cultures in which they live.

This book provides a timely contribution to the field of gender and development in the face of the looming failure of international development targets, the deepening HIV/AIDS pandemic and the increased incidence of civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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.

In recent decades, a more formalized and forceful shift has emerged in the legislative realm when it comes to gender and sexual justice in Africa. This rigorous, timely volume brings together leading and rising scholars across disciplines to evaluate these ideological struggles and reconsider the modern history of human rights on the continent. Broad in geographic coverage and topical in scope, chapters investigate such subjects as marriage legislation in Mali, family violence experienced by West African refugees, sex education in Uganda, and statutes criminalizing homosexuality in Senegal. These case studies highlight the nuances and contradictions in the varied ways key actors make arguments for or against rights. They also explore how individual countries draft and implement laws that attempt to address the underlying problems. Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa details how legal efforts in the continent can often be moralizing enterprises, illuminating how these processes are closely tied to notions of ethics, personhood, and citizenship. The contributors provide new appraisals of recent events, with fresh arguments about the relationships between local and global fights for rights. This interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in African studies, anthropology, history, and gender studies.

Scholars and the general public have not paid much attention to non-rape forms of sex discrimination, such as sexual harassment. The concept is seen to suffer from ambiguity, and is often confused with courting or playful flirting. When it finally did receive attention sexual harassment was seen almost exclusively as a workplace phenomenon. The main objective of the study was to generate insight into Ghanaian perspectives on sexual harassment in relation to the definition, sites of harassment, experiences and perspectives on redress.

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.

A study of same-sex passion, desire, and intimacy among working-class women who love women in West Africa.

Since the turn of the millennium, in Ghana and in other African countries, there has been a vociferous debate over the history and present condition of the family. The debate has largely fragmented the Ghanaian constituency into two nearly intransigent camps: those who think the indigenous family system should experience cultural osmosis to accommodate the seismic Western cultural revolutions and the overwhelming religious constituency who advocate the retention of conservative family system. This book is a contribution to the debate. Written by an African Studies academic, it seeks to use the resources of both the social sciences and religion to assess the merits of the various parties to the debate. The author believes in the legitimacy of the traditional family system as conditio sine qua non for preserving human civilization. Nevertheless, the goal of this book is not to further polarize the Ghanaian front, but build bridges, by inviting the various parties to the debate to walk the complex pathways of exercising compassion without compromising the values that support human flourishing. Charles Prempeh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana.