INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY
Sexuality research in Kenya
The dynamics of sexuality: the focus of this study
Methodological aspects of sexuality research
PART II: YOUNG PROFESSIONALS: EMBLEMS OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Sexuality and societal transformations
The young and ambitious in Nairobi
Young urban professionals and the formation of a contemporary identity
PART III: SOCIETY IN FLAMES: SEXUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF AIDS
AIDS as a context of life
Sexuality and contemporary lifestyles
PART IV: AMBIGUOUS PLEASURES: SEXUAL DESIRE, CAREER, AND FEMININITY
Female sexuality in Nairobi, Kenya and beyond
Pamela, Martha, Njeri, Tayiani and Dorcas
Between sexual allure and limited availability
PART V: AMBIGUOUS PLEASURES: SEX, RICHES AND MASCULINITY
Male sexuality in Nairobi society, Kenya and beyond
Alex, Eric, Tom, Maurice and Ongeri
Moving between sexual prowess and restrained potency
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
The manifestations of romantic love: music
Sign of the times: imaginations and practices of romantic love versus westernization, or the perils of modernity
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
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.
Rachel Spronkis Assistant Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on intimacy and middle class formation in Kenya, on methodological questions of sexuality research and on the bounds of poststructural approaches to understand how sex(uality) is experienced.
Schlagwörter zu:
Ambiguous Pleasures von Rachel Spronk - mit der ISBN: 9780857454799
Anthropology (General), Gender Studies and Sexuality, Sociology, Online-Buchhandlung
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