WOMEN, VISIBILITY AND MORALITY IN KENYAN POPULAR MEDIA

177pp., paperback, Grahamstown, 2020

"Why are married women often the subject of ‘sex scandals’? Why is it scandalous for a married woman to have an extra-marital affair, but for men it demonstrates their ‘manhood’? Why is sexual desire ‘normal’ for men, but ‘immoral’ for women? Why are young, university-educated women framed in social media as money-grabbing hussies? What does it mean that women are challenging social norms about their place in society, and how they ought to conduct themselves? What are the social meanings of the media’s cautionary tales about the punishment meted out to women they mark as ‘wicked’, ‘loose’, ‘immoral’, ‘wild’, ‘difficult’, ‘educated’, when they step outside of patriarchal conventions of what it means to be a Kenyan woman? Ligaga innovatively shows us how we can read Kenyan women’s ‘transgressions’, not as moral flaws, but rather as demonstrations of how they negotiate the constraints of national cultural conventions, and in so doing offer new ways of ‘becoming’ a Kenyan woman." Lynette Steenveld, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Rhodes University

Dina Ligaga is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. She is co-editor of Radio in Africa)and Eastern African Intellectual Traditions.