Four feminists from different parts of the continent converse, electronically, about their own beauty practices: Aleya Kassam (33, Kenya); Fatma Emam (33, Egypt); Valérie Bah (29, Benin and Haiti); Yewande Omotoso (35, Nigeria). Moderated by Simidele Dosekun.
Category: Archive
Skimpy Fashion and Sexuality in Sheebah Karungi’s Performances
Myriad factors determine people’s choice of dress for any particular occasion, but when the event is a musical performance in a short-lived stage appearance, or in a music video meant to be viewed widely and possibly eternally, what to wear becomes a significant decision.
“These Girls’ Fashion is Sick!”: An African City and the Geography of Sartorial Worldliness
They are the noble savages, staring out from coffee table books. Africa Adorned. The Last Nomads. Backdrops and extras for Vogue fashion shoots. Stock ingredients for tourist brochures … They are the myth of tribal splendour. Everything about them is foreign … Their “timeless culture” is the stuff of children’s books, of Western fantasies. They…
Contesting Beauty: Black Lesbians on the Stage
Introduction The 1995 publication, Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (Gevisser and Cameron, 1995), pioneered a new field of study that is yet to be fully recognised in South Africa. This rich collection, written by South Africans across the country, assembled a wide range of gay, lesbian and, although unnamed, transgender experiences.
African Women Do Not Look Good in Wigs: Gender, Beauty Rituals and Cultural Identity in Anglophone Cameroon, 1961-1972
“Nebuchadnezzar lived in the bush and his nails became so long that they looked like claws of cats, following a punishment from God for his disobedience,” runs a May 1964 letter to ‘Women’s Special,’ a dedicated women’s advice column for the English-language newspaper, the Cameroon Times (Isuk, 1964:4).
The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa
From wigs and weaves to skin-bleaching to the clothes that we use to cover or reveal our bodies, fashion and beauty are complex structural considerations for women in Africa, and at the same time immensely personal. Occupying diverse socio-cultural positions, we exercise different degrees of practical choice over how we dress and adorn ourselves, limited…
Feminist Africa Issue 5. 2005: Sexual Cultures
Welcome to Feminist Africa’s thematic focus on sexualities. This issue provides us with the opportunity to continue some of the debates initiated by Patricia MacFadden, Charmaine Pereira and Sylvia Tamale in an earlier issue (see Feminist Africa 2). In keeping with Feminist Africa’s intellectual development agenda, the present issue also provides a platform for new…
Feminist Africa Issue 4. 2005: Women Mobilised
This issue of Feminist Africa 4: Women Mobilised presents new theorisations of postcolonial gender politics. The contributors document and critically reflect on contemporary gender struggles in a number of key arenas. Needless to say, for every example that is discussed in the following pages, many more have been omitted, about which a few points are…
Feminist Africa Issue 3. 2004: National Politricks
Feminist Africa 3 critically explores a continental landscape largely driven by the still heavily masculine imperatives of nation-statehood. Within this paradigm, Africa has accumulated four decades of post-colonial political experience, and three decades of gender equality activism. Contemporary feminist scholarship on African politics faces the task of interrogating an increasingly tricky landscape. On the one…
Feminist Africa Issue 2. 2003: Changing Cultures
The challenge that this presents is for innovativeness in contesting discourses, practices and identities that police our rights, freedoms and desires. Contributions to this issue explore these courageous interventions by showing how creative writers have struggled with language, as the key repository and instrument of our cultures, to re-envisage how we see ourselves and our…