Books in the Critical African Studies in Gender and Sexuality series

A cross-sectoral overview of social and political development policies and practices and their gender outcomes in Nigeria, this volume describes the status of women and men under the colonial and post-colonial policy regimes, unearthing the gender relations and gender (in)equality outcomes.

This examination of Kenya's middle class demonstrates how contemporary social performances of femaleness are disrupting and complicating conceptions of gender and gendered identities and institutions. This book will alter scholarship of female gender identity in Kenya, forcing the creation of new, responsive action for African girls and women.

Critiquing the valorization of democracy as a means of containing violence and stabilizing political contestation, this book draws links between the democratization process and sexual/gendered violence observed against women during electioneering periods in Kenya. The book shows the contradictory relationship between democracy and gendered violence as being largely influenced in the first instance by the capitalist interests vested in the colonial state and its imperative to exploit laboring women; secondly, in the nature of the postcolonial state and politics largely captured by ethnic, bourgeois class interests; and third, influenced by neoliberal political ideology that has remained largely disarticulated from womens structural positions in Kenyan society. It argues that colonial capitalist interests established certain patterns of gender exploitation that extended into the postcolonial period such that the indigenous bourgeoisie took the form of an ethnicized elite. Ethnicity shaped politics and neoliberal political ideology further blocked women's integration into politics in substantive ways. It concludes that it is not so much the norms and values of liberal democracy that assist in understanding women's exclusion, but rather the structural dynamics that have shaped women's experiences of democratic politics. In this way, gender violence in the context of democratization and electoral violence with its gendered manifestation can be fully understood as deeply embedded in the history of the structural dynamics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchalism in Kenya.

Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies emphasizes the urgency and necessity of new research in gender and queer studies in and on Senegalese societies. Contributors explore how aspects of philosophy, politics, identity, literature, language, and community impact and are impacted by gender and sexuality in post-colonial Senegal.

This comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the lens of gender captures women's complex experiences and the valiant ways they carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and postwar Nigeria. It fills a gap in war scholarship fifty years after the conflict by presenting women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency.

This volume examines Nigerian policy experiences across the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras. The focus is on gender issues in economic planning policies and productive sector policies including agriculture, entrepreneurship, and information and communication technologies.