In Calabar, Nigeria, young women envisage their futures to be full of possibilities. By contrast, their present realities often see them stuck in the house enduring long periods of waiting. Restricted by failing institutions, family and church pressures, and the fear of others' jealousy, young women find that there is no clear route to realising their aspirations. As they wait alone in the house, they constantly communicate with others on mobile phones and BlackBerries. This paper examines how young women in Calabar use mobile phones as a way of reconceptualising issues of trust, affect and intimacy. It argues that where they employ methods of concealment to chat with othersrevealing neither their true identity nor personal detailsmobile communication enables distance, becoming an invaluable means for creating new forms of sociality and future opportunities. Illuminating 'feminine cultures of waiting', this paper furthers recent analyses of youth, time and productivity. KEYWORDS Young women; Calabar; mobile phones; aspirations; intimacy When I first met NK in the summer of 2010, she was studying Accountancy at one of Calabar's two universities and had recently started baking and selling cakes on her compound. By the time I returned to Calabar for doctoral fieldwork a year later, she had finished her studies. Besides some periodic travel to family in Port Harcourt, she had spent the intervening months in her rented room in Calabar. In her late twenties, she was looking to finding a well-paid office job before getting married and settling down. Yet, as I rounded off my doctoral fieldwork at the end of 2012, she was still 'working on' marriage possibilities and, with her university results still not released months after finishing her degree, was happy just to find any odd work to get money. Assuring me that God would be faithful in delivering her aspirations, NK

The quiet city of Calabar in southeastern Nigeria is famed for its burgeoning church scene offering various spiritual services. In this religious marketplace, The Brook Church stands out due to its beautiful building, well-dressed congregation, clever branding, and its ‘unique’ preaching. Focusing on young women’s engagement with The Brook Church, this article builds on recent analyses seeking to understand the attraction of Pentecostalism for this often marginalised and disenfranchised social group. Examining The Brook Church’s life-affirming doctrine of Zoe, in which individual aspirations are realised through careful and timely management of the religious self, the article explores how religious action and rhetoric mould new subjectivities aimed for success. Illustrating how Pentecostal practice gives young women a newfound sense of self-worth and confidence, the article’s emphasis on the individual project suggests we should broaden debates that solely equate young women’s engagement with Pentecostalism with sexuality and marriage opportunities.

Beauty pageants in Nigeria have become highly popular spectacles, the crowned winners venerated for their beauty, success and ability to better society through charity. This paper focuses on the Carnival Calabar Queen pageant, highlighting how pageants, at the nexus of gender and the nation, are sites of social reproduction by creating feminine ideals. A divinely inspired initiative of a fervently Pentecostal First Lady, the pageant crowns an ambassador for young women's rights. While the queen must have ‘grace and beauty’ and be ‘ever prayerful’, the discussion unravels emic conceptions of feminine beauty, religiosity and respectability. Yet, young women also use pageantry as a ‘platform’ for success, hoping to challenge the double bind of gender and generation they experience in Nigeria. The discussion pays particular attention to how young women, trying to overcome the insecurities of (urban) Nigerian life, make choices to negotiate individualism with community, and piety with patriarchy. Ethnographically, this paper situates beauty pageants in the region's past and present practices that mould feminine subjectivities. Contributing young women's experiences to recent literature on the temporalities of African youth, the paper's explicit focus on how new subjectivities form through action illuminates important themes regarding agency, resistance and notions of the religious self. In doing so, it furthers current analyses of Pentecostalism, seeking a more nuanced understanding of gender reconfiguration and demonstrating how religious subjects can be formed outside church institutions.

Since 2012, the influx of affordable smartphones to urban Nigeria has revolutionized how young people take, store and circulate photographs. Crucially, this ever-expanding digital archive provides urban youth with a means to communicate new ideas of self, allowing a marginalized group to display fortunes that often belie their difficult realities. Through gestures and poses, fashion and style, the companionship of others, or the use of particular backdrops and locations, these photographs contain certain semiotics that allude to the subject owning the means for success in urban Nigeria. Similarly, as youth constantly store photographs of themselves on their handsets alongside those of celebrities, patrons and friends, coveted commodities and aspirational memes, they construct personal narratives that place them at the centre of global flows and networks. With the ability to constantly retake, update and propagate photographs, the discrepancies between in- and off-frame identities become ambiguous. This article explores how young people in Calabar, south-eastern Nigeria, use digital photographs on their mobile phones to cultivate new visions of themselves. Arguing that these photographs not only represent superlative aspirations but are also integral to social becoming, the discussion examines how digital images allow youth to reposition themselves within (and beyond) Nigerian society. Ephemerality is central: digital photographs can be easily circulated and retain some permanence on social media, yet these immaterial objects can easily be lost from handsets. In thinking about the futures of African youth and African photography, this article therefore interrogates the tensions of private and public archives.

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