Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies

This volume explores aspects of gender and sexuality in Kenya through the lens of humane scholarship, philosophies, politics, identities, cosmoses, literatures, languages, cultures, and more.

In Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies: Centering the Human and the Humane in Critical Studies, edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye, contributors explore the application of ubuntu/utu responsive perspectives and methods to critical studies. Through the lens of ubuntu/utu, the contributors to this Kenya-focused volume draw from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, media studies, and development studies, among others, to demonstrate the urgency and necessity of humane scholarship/research in gender and queer studies. By centering decolonial approaches and the human and humane, concentrating on subjects and identities that have been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive. They advance within Kenyan studies themes and elements of alternative, non-binary, variant, and non-heteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices, as well as approaches to doing knowledge. Underscoring the timeliness of such a text is evidence rendered in sections of the collection highlighting the significance of ubuntu/utu-centric scholarship. Challenging the erasure of the human in academic works, the chapters in this volume look inward and locate the voices and experiences of Kenyan peoples as the pivotal locus of analysis and epistemological derivation.

Introduction: Toward Humane Scholarship in Gender and Sexualities

Besi Brillian Muhonja

1. Feminist Biographies - Telling Our Stories

Betty Wambui

2. “Beach-boy Elders” and “Young Big-men”: Subverting the Temporalities of Aging in Kenya’s Ethno-erotic Economies

George Paul Meiu

3. Redefining the Female Body: The Legislative Process against Female Circumcision in Kenya

Miriam Jerotich Kilimo

4. Still at a Crossroad: Theories in Activism and Fight for Rights of the LGBTI Community in Kenya

Dorothy Owino Rombo and Anne Namatsi Lutomia

5. Going on a Real Date: Afro-bubblegum and Female Same Sex Desire in Eastern African Literature

Joya Uraizee

6. Dimensions of Motherhood in an African World Sense: Ritual and Power among Avalogooli

Besi Brillian Muhonja

7. When Adult Status Trumps Gender: Recentering Tradition in Politics

Matthew K. Gichohi

8. Twenty Years After: Gender and Sexuality among Middle-Aged Professionals in Nairobi

Rachel Spronk

Conclusion: Utu/ubuntu: Centering the Human and the Humane in Critical Approaches to Africana Studies

Babacar M’Baye

Index

About the Editors

About the Contributors