‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

Women bargaining with patriarchy in coastal Kenya: contradictions, creative agency and food provisioning

“…In this context, women's capacity to maintain their own and their children's everyday security, including their daily meals, are not simply related to their own assets and income or that of their husbands (Karl 2009;Garcia andWanner 2017, Doss et al 2017), rather it is built on their gender roles and relationships within patriarchal structures although the negotiations take place at the cost of their and their children's everyday diets and labour as shown by the cases of Najima and Tumaini. This corroborates the literature on the domestic arena as a significant site in which women can exercise considerable power, including in relation to men (Robson 2006;Jackson 2007;Hanrahan 2015;Stark 2016).…”

“…There has been a tendency to analyse child care responsibilities, as with other of women's reproductive roles, largely in terms of their burden of labour and their constraint on women's ability to earn independent incomes. This study supports some of the new critical work on 'care', which recognises that giving care can be intrinsically satisfying and can be a way of gaining or wielding power (Robson 2006;Huijsmans 2013;Hanrahan, 2015). These findings question the vision of women's empowerment in development policy, which emphasises women's economic independence.…”

“…Following Habermas's (1976) analysis of the way in which the incomplete structure of class is manifest in contradictions that offer opportunities for subordinate groups to negotiate, Connell (2009) conceptualises the interdependent nature of gender relations as showing similar contradictions that can be strategically exploited by women. Crucially, whilst the domestic arena is a major site for the reproduction of gender inequalities, it is also ironically a significant site in which women can exercise considerable power, including in relation to men (Robson 2006;Jackson 2007;Hanrahan 2015;Stark 2016).…”

Gender, households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

“…Joining a number of feminist geographers who have paid attention to the domestic spaces of women's everyday life (e.g. Domosh 1998;Hanrahan 2015;Johnson 2006;Supski 2006), in this study, space and place apply to RMW's households in a rural Dagomba community in the Northern Region. We conceptualise gender, household and place as co-constituted through specific intra-household dynamics that reflect the historically developed unequal access to resources between and among male and female household members and the different livelihood strategies used by them.…”

“…If resistance is thought to come with subjection (Butler 1997;Gibson, law, and McKay 2001) and if the reproduction of social relationships does not necessarily negate women's agency (cf. Hanrahan 2015), then it becomes possible to see not only how RMW's subjection through performances comply with the existing gendered social expectations but also how they use the context-specific exercise of their agency to navigate, negotiate and change power within delimited domestic spaces. This understanding recognises women's complex agency that facilitates everyday contradictory micro-transformations more fully than just limiting attention to women's agency in their large-scale resistance to structure (cf.…”