Mapping emerging constructions of good time girls in Kenyan popular media

Ligaga, Dina

doi:10.1080/13696815.2014.927324

Cited by 35 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…They come across, especially through their lyrical content, as not expressing entitlement over women’s bodies. This is an observation that may be appreciated by several pockets of feminist scholars ( Sommers-Flanagan et al, 1993 ; McRobbie, 2004 ; Bretthauer et al, 2007 ; Mowatt et al, 2013 ; Ligaga, 2014 ; Ligaga, 2020 etc) who have partly spoken truth to power as it relates to heteropatriarchal men and their relationships with women’s bodies.…”

Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

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Stemming from a broader PhD project, this article argues that neoliberal post-feminist cultural sensibilities–entrenched in contemporary popular culture–about empowered, agentic and self-determining women, are regressive for the feminist advancement of gender-relational equality in the African context. To arrive at this conclusion, the central aim was to elucidate whether the gender-performative representations prioritised in the multimodal discourses of Afrobeats music videos are implicated in post-feminist sensibilities and if so, in what ways and to what effect? Given the continent’s richly diverse, yet largely heteropatriarchal, sociocultural formations, I argue that ideas about empowered, agentic and self-determining (black) African women are–based on the limited purview offered through the multimodal discourses of a small corpus of Afrobeats music videos–no more than sociocultural façades as opposed to gender-relational realities in our context. The article relied on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a total of nine music videos drawn from the PhD project’s larger corpus of 25 Afrobeats music videos, their accompanying song lyrics, as well as a selection of YouTube viewer comments extracted from the analysed music videos. In critically exploring the gender-relational depictions prioritised in the analysed music videos, I argue for the consideration of what I am coining “misogyrom”; a gender-relational cultural sensibility which, in tandem with a post-feminist sensibility partly undergirding the multimodal discourses of these music videos, effectively veil this popular musical genre’s evidently sexist and misogynistic undertones that subvert potentialities of empowered, agentic and self-determining black African women.

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Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

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“…The dirty connection also relates the general sentiment that the group of women live and feel as mediating their experience of living in the city, where the anxiety about their sexualities continue to frame the very possibility of their autonomy, agency and freedom to experience love. As 'good time girls', despite their class positions, they also continue to represent the dangers posed in relation to the African urban (Ligaga, 2014). I would further add that the modernity of African urban life experiences the same performative and affective ambivalence, as both dangerous and desirable.…”

Section: Backwardnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling backwards: temporal ambivalence in An African City

Mupotsa

2019

Feminist Theory

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The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence. An African City offered its first season in 2014 and was immediately received as 'Africa's own Sex and the City', praised for challenging the image of a backward Africa, while criticised for offering an unrealistic account of life for urban African women. The series is set around the lives of five women, one of whom plays the leading role as narrator. The 'African city' serves as another character, rather than a mere backdrop for the action to unfold. I argue that the various characters perform an ongoing ambivalence towards progress, always stuck in a look backward. It is not simply that the quest for romance fails as part of the drama, but that the drama of failure itself folds onto both the African city and African women as figures that remain eternally stuck in their relation to the temporalities that accrue around modernity.

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“…From the published literature, however, women are either framed as incapable of feeling shame or endowed with the capacity to produce shame in others. It is unclear if, and how, these accounts explain why recently in South Africa, Malawi, Kenya and Zimbabwe women have been publicly stripped and humiliated in the streets and online spaces for their supposedly shameless sartorial and sexual choices (Ligaga 2014(Ligaga , 2016. These shaming assaults are undoubtedly disciplinary techniques deployed to inscribe heteropatriarchal ideals that attempt to normalize female corporeality and sexual practices.…”

Section: Shame As Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Adejunmobi¹,

Coetzee

2019

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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.The handbook is divided into seven parts: i) Mapping political agencies, ii) Journeys, geographies, identities, iii) Working through genre, iv) The world of and beyond humans, v) Everyday sociality, vi) Bodies, subjectivities, affect, vii) Literary networks. In each, contributors address the themes of the section from a variety of perspectives in conjunction with analysis of different literary texts. All chapters are original research essays written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works.The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis.

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Mapping emerging constructions of good time girls in Kenyan popular media

Cited by 35 publications

References 8 publications

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Feeling backwards: temporal ambivalence in An African City

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

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