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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Representations of female sexuality in local Nigerian women’s erotic poetry.
| Panel |
31. Sexuality and Politics in Africa
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| Paper ID | 692 |
| Author(s) |
Izugbara, Chimaraoke O.
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | African women’s sexuality is the locus of both increasing academic curiosity and confusion. In the emerging literature, however, female sexuality in the continent has been constructed in terms of danger, passivity, risk and inferiority. Drawing upon research into indigenous women’s erotic songs and chants among the Ngwa of eastern Nigeria, this paper ponders representations of women’s sexuality in women’s erotic songs and chants among the Ngwa of southeastern Nigeria. Women’s erotic songs speak clearly of women’s entitlement to both homoerotic and heterosexual pleasure, agency, and power and constitute a strategy to undercut the social ideologies that frequently associate proper femininity with sexual passivity, receptivity, and domesticity. The paper contends that women’s erotic songs and chants are part of the rich but neglected corpus of traditional sexuality narratives that has yet to inform contemporary scholarly debates on the cultural construction of gender and sexuality in Africa.
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