My Mobile Phone, My Life: Deconstructing Development (Maendeleo) and Gender Narratives among the Marakwet in Kenya

The increased adoption of mobile telephony for development is based on the assumption that mobile telephony has the potential to foster social change. To some, such technology can aid most developing countries to leapfrog stages of development. Yet to others, the technology is at most counterproductive: development has been understood differently by the developed in comparison to the underdeveloped. Missing in this narrative is the people’s own conceptualization of the term development as well as their gender roles, often a component of development programs. This study presents findings on an alternative conceptualization of development, dubbed maendeleo, a Swahili term that denotes process, participation, progress, growth, change, and improved standard of living—as defined by the people or women themselves as they interact with mobile telephony in rural Kenya. Using Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to analyze interviews, this study proposes an alternative conceptualization of development. This different perspective on development denotes both process and emergence, through the processes and roles that mobile telephony plays in the techno-social interactions of users, context, and other factors as they form social assemblages that are fluid in nature, hence challenging the Western proposition that new technologies produce development understood as social transformation.

Framing the Other: Rethinking Media Representations of Mursi Women’s Display of Gendered Lip-Plated Bodies

With illustrations drawn from Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers’s documentary Framing the Other (2012), this article rethinks media representation of the contact between Mursi lip-plated women of Ethiopia and Western tourists who come to sightsee and photograph their traditionally modified bodies. The film Framing the Other represents this contact as a destructive force that has not only enabled Mursi women’s victimhood as objects of the tourist gaze, but one that has contributed negative cultural change and loss of tradition. In this article, I provide an alternative, if not oppositional, interpretation that only attends to the nuanced ways Mursi women negotiate cultural loss and change, and recognizes modalities of agential tactics they deploy to negotiate cultural exchange and perform identity work within a cross-cultural contact zone marred with significant inequalities that work to their (dis)advantage. I do not imply that my reading will provide a definitive reading; rather, I reexamine the vanishing tradition and victimhood narratives portrayed in Framing the Other, showing that its multiple layers of meaning in fact motivate an oppositional and alternative reading.

A Feminist Reading of Hashtag Activism in Ghana

This article examines Akumaa Mama Zimbi’s activism in the Ghanaian social media landscape, specifically Twitter. I argue that while it is imperative to critique her hashtag activism for its complicity with patriarchal ideology in the repression of female sexuality, it is important to contextualize her work within conversations on gender activism and feminisms in Ghana. This article parses out the politics of and tensions in feminist movements on the continent demonstrating how certain activist labels can be depoliticized and used to undo decades of feminist work on the continent. By drawing on my lived experience as an ethnically marginalized Muslim woman born and raised in Ghana who is active in the country’s digital (activist) public sphere, I present a critical analysis of the pervasive conversations on gender activism and feminism in Ghana. I employ the conceptual framework of framing to examine the main topics that arise out of Akumaa’s #WearYourDrossNow campaign on Ghana Twitter which aims at discouraging young women from engaging in premarital sex. I assert that Akumaa’s work is inspired by her personal interpretation of gender activism and is closely tied to religious morality and conservative notions of female sexuality in Ghana.

Gendered Digital Inequities in African Contexts: Measuring and Bridging the Gaps

While access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and the internet has increased over the last couple of years, new digital inequalities also continue to emerge regarding gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and different levels of digital literacies and education. The gendered nature of access to and use of digital technologies shapes opportunities for many African women, influences the process of social inclusion, and thus exacerbates social inequalities. This essay interrogates the interrelationships of gender, new digital technologies, and socioeconomic development among marginalized groups in different contexts in countries on the continent of Africa, focusing on the rising digital inequities among marginalized communities. I make the case for the collection of disaggregated data and comparative studies of gendered digital inequities as important for understanding and bridging gaps. By focusing on marginalization rather than poverty, I examine the relationships between people, locales, and institutions rather than assets alone. By examining how distributed groups connect through digital tools, I hope to raise some important questions about the nature of digital inequities in today’s networked society and address gender empowerment through inclusive and research-based ICT policy making and practice.

Reading Representations of (Un)desirable GBTI Men on QueerLife’s 4Men Website Section

Using discourse analysis and semiotic analysis, this article examines how the language and images of the “4men” section of the South African site QueerLife construct masculinity and femininity as (un)desirable aspects in gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (GBTI) men’s relationships. The use of “(un)desirable” in this article suggests that there are contesting definitions of what constitutes desirable and undesirable traits in GBTI relationships. Although QueerLife states that it caters to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people, this article only focuses on GBTI men’s content in the 4men section. The article argues that despite claiming to cater to all within the LGBTI spectrum, representations on QueerLife 4men seem to treat masculinity as the most desirable trait. This encompasses traits such as penis size, athleticism, class, emotionlessness, and muscular, firmly built bodies. Overall, the analysis of these texts will show that among what such representations seek to achieve in post-apartheid South Africa is an appeal to white, urban, middle-class gay communities.

Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital Media

Over the past decade and earlier, much of the academic and grey literature has painted an optimistic picture of rapidly increasing access and growth of digital technologies in Africa. Industry statistics put internet penetration in Africa close to 40 percent and growing, even though the continent still lags behind the world average of Internet users (Internet World Statistics, June 2019). Some estimates predict that by 2025 the sub-continent will add 167 million mobile subscribers to its existing 456 million (GSMA Report, 2019). Mobile devices, especially, have assumed centrality in the lives of ordinary people and provide prospects for Africa to leapfrog into the modern digital world. Smart phones are enabling millions of Africans to share news and information more easily and to tap into all kinds of essential services, much like elsewhere in the world.

The Hakuna Kama Mama Project: Producing Technologies of Resistance to Maternal Mortality in East Africa

Giving birth can be a life or death matter for many pregnant women. As a consequence of the high rates of maternal death in many countries, death in childbirth has come to be understood as an unfortunate yet accepted part of the contemporary maternal health landscape. Globally, the high rates of maternal death comprise many overlapping historical and systemic features that are not always easy to disentangle. Adding to the complexity are entrenched approaches to maternal mortality that tend toward one-size-fits-all strategies, approaches that minimize or erase the specificity of local and regional differences. This trend is problematic as Western biomedical approaches often demand that women perform assigned roles and operate under systems not of their own control or making—ignoring long histories, behaviors, and cultural beliefs that have preexisted this moment and have supported women’s authoritative knowledge. As an intervention into this landscape, this discussion introduces an ongoing project, Hakuna Kama Mama (HKM), which expands dominant framings by populating the healthscape with localized understandings of maternal health because African women are often regarded as the objects of expert knowledge rather than the subjects of their own stories. The HKM project centers upon the participants’ subjective perspectives of motherhood in their daily lives because they are knowledgeable subjects who desire to be seen as capable, responsible experts—as mothers and hard-working contributors to their community.

Newspapers as Gendered Spaces: Photographic Representation of Kenyan Female Athletes in the Kenyan Press during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games

Kenya is known globally as the home of world champions in athletics, including the Olympics. However, although the Olympic games dominate public discourse in Kenya when they are being held every four years, there is hardly any academic interest in the many press photographs that are published in this season. The main objective of this study is to analyze how female athletes were photographically represented compared with their male counterparts in the Rio 2016 Olympics in the Kenyan newspapers. I employed quantitative content analysis and semiotic analysis to study Kenya’s two leading daily newspapers, the Daily Nation and the Standard between August 5 and 21, 2016, the time the Olympic games took place. My findings indicate that the two newspapers allocated more photographic space to men compared with women athletes. The findings also show that photographs in this study depicted women as weaker than men, as emotional unlike their logical male counterparts, and generally as inferior to men.