Women, visibility and morality in Kenyan

Dina Ligaga

• Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781920033637
• eBook ISBN: 9781920033651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women, visibility and morality in Kenyan popular media explores familiar constructions of femininity to assess ways in which it circulates in discourse, both stereotypically and otherwise. It assesses the meanings of such discourses and their articulations in various public platforms in Kenya. The book draws together theoretical questions on ëpre-convenedí scripts that contain or condition how women can circulate in public. The book asks questions about particular interpretations of womenís bodies that are considered transgressive or unruly and why these bodies become significant symbolic sites for the generation of knowledge on morality and sexuality. The book also poses questions about genre and representations of femininity. The assertion made is that for knowledges of femininity to circulate effectively, they must be melodramatic, spectacular and scandalous. Ultimately, the book asks how such a theorisation of popular modes of representation enable a better understanding of the connections between gender, sexuality and violence in Kenya.

1

Women and the politics of visibility in Kenya

Introduction

On 18 February 2015, a story broke in Kenyan media revealing that a 27-year-old woman had been arrested for failing to pay a hotel bill. The story spread quickly on various media platforms, including television, radio, newspaper and social media sites. Indeed, in days, she was one of the most talked about people in Kenya. Two leading newspapers, The Standard and The Daily Nation, reported that Laura Oyier had been arrested and charged with obtaining credit under false pretences.1 Ordinarily, this would have been just another news story. Because this incident happened to a woman staying at one of Kenya’s high-end hotels and had occurred on Valentine’s Day, and because the unpaid bill had come to approximately two thousand three hundred American dollars, the story became spectacular. There were multiple speculations about what could have happened prior to the news event. The narratives circulating on social media and online tabloid websites such as Ghafla! and Mpasho,2 stated that there was a mysterious man at the centre of the scandal. They suggested that Oyier had been left in the lurch to teach her a ‘lesson’. They also suggested that she was a ‘socialite’, a ‘party animal’ and a ‘good time girl’.3 Oyier was turned into an example of a ‘bad’ woman who had defied public expectations of good feminine behaviour. Appearing undaunted by the fuss the media created following her arrest, her loud and opinionated responses helped to fuel this perception. Indeed, Oyier’s confidence and refusal to feel shame made her visible, but in an unexpected way. Not long after the media furore surrounding her arrest and eventual release had died down, she was offered a job as a radio disc jockey.4 In addition, her hotel bill was settled in full by sympathisers, among them well-known media celebrities, and once again she was in the limelight, both as an object of curiosity and of mirth. This time, the public were curious and amused, and endless jokes were shared at her expense about how she looked, her confidence and her refusal to feel shame.

I begin with the example above to signal the preoccupations of this book. It is a book about Kenyan public cultures on sexuality and morality, with a focus on political, cultural and economic influences on constructions of femininity. The book critiques public constructions of femininity in Kenyan mediascapes, in which public scripts act as screens for reading women in public spaces. It dwells on what such public interfaces mean, how they are constructed in Kenyan public imaginations, and eventually how these constructions circulate in discourse. I argue that there is a link between these constructions and the increasing violence against women, particularly as performed in public. The book asks questions about what visibility means for women in such contexts, and engages with various dynamics between institutionalised moralities, and emergent counterpublics. The main questions that I pursue then are: in what ways are women policed in Kenyan public culture, whether in political, cultural or socioeconomic contexts? What are the interfaces between constructions, circulation and counterpublics of femininity in these public cultures? When and how are women visible in these cultures, and with what kinds of repercussions? How are their narratives articulated in popular media forms, whether as pedagogic or advice columns, cautionary tales, ‘tragic’ news or through other forms of sensationalist reporting? Lastly, what does the ubiquity of public scripts suggest broadly about the theorisation of women, morality and sexuality in Kenya? How does such a theorisation enable a better understanding of the connections between gender, sexuality and violence in Kenya? The public script and how it circulates stereotypical representations of femininity provides an important entry into understanding Kenyan public culture. I use feminist scholarship on women, sexuality and morality to engage gender and sexual politics in Kenya. The idea of a public script regarding gender and sexuality in Kenya defines a publicly endorsed moral narrative that is supported by existing structures of patriarchy and tradition. It suggests that femininity is regulated via popular culture as well as other institutions to ensure control of women’s social behaviour in public.

Two significant points emerge for the book: firstly, women’s bodies are significant symbolic sites for the generation of discourses on morality and sexuality. Secondly, for such narratives to circulate effectively, they operate through melodramatic, spectacular and scandalous forms. These elements create a pattern for narrating gender and sexuality in the Kenyan public sphere and emphasise the need to discipline the female body in public in order to generate its morality discourse. I borrow the idea of the script from John Gagnon and William Simon (2017) whose labelling theories identify sexual scripts as ideological constructs that ‘shape what is seen as sexual or non-sexual, normal or abnormal, pleasurable or painful; and which offer signposts for human interaction’ (Weeks 2014, 6). Similarly, public scripts discursively define what is morally acceptable in terms of public behaviour. For Gagnon and Simon, sexual scripts operate at the level of language and symbols, and act as guidelines to sexual conduct (2017). In this way, scripting is not static, but is produced and reproduced ‘at personal, interactional and cultural-historical levels’ (Plummer in Gagnon and Simon 2017, xiv). Scripting suggests some form of invented structure. In this book, I use scripting to suggest mediation of public sentiment towards women’s social behaviour aimed at regulating such behaviour.

I draw on existing scholarship on sexuality in Kenya, acknowledging the various bodies of work that explore varying ideas on sexuality, including the links between, for instance, adolescence and sexuality, sexuality and HIV/AIDs, and sexuality and anthropology, among other themes. Moreover, I am specifically drawn to bodies of work that explore cultural constructions of sexuality in Kenya. In relation to this, I find Rachel Spronk’s (2012) work particularly useful. I am drawn to the link she makes between sexuality and anxiety, which troubles easy readings of sexual moralities in Kenya. According to Spronk, sexuality entails the interface between social conventions upheld in public, and sexual pleasure; ‘a tension between practices and ideologies, between personal experiences and public opinion’ (2012, 13). The tension, as she argues, rightly captures the nuances of sexuality in Kenya. She urges a recognition of the ways in which young Kenyan professionals (a group that she studies in detail) both defy and conform to ‘normative discourses of femininity and masculinity, in that they both comply with and challenge common sense’ (2012, 15). She adds that ‘their narratives are structured by accounts of love and desire, where sex is related to notions of contemporary womanhood and manhood’ (2012, 15). A complex reading of sexuality is important if one is to understand the Kenyan public imagination on sexuality. As Spronk argues, there is a tension between sexuality as socially constructed and how it circulates among individuals. While Spronk focuses on ideas of selfhood and personhood in a broader context of cultural production of sexuality, I focus on public productions and circulations of sexuality and morality, and what these public interfaces mean in reading productions of violence against women in Kenyan media. In other words, I focus on the ways in which texts circulate meanings of sexuality in public, and how one can understand that circulation as an interface between public sentiment, disciplinary regimes and subjective positions on sexuality. I argue that the public imagination is shaped by a variety of factors, both institutional and in everyday life.

The book is premised on two related strands of thought. The first has to do with the relationship between the state and other dominant social institutions and the media on the one hand; and popular culture and everyday life in Kenya on the other. I argue that there is need for a closer examination of institutionally endorsed cultural productions in Kenya that generate narratives of gender and sexuality during moments of social crisis or change. The second idea develops from the argument that popular cultures circulate using public scripts to control and manage narratives of gender and sexuality. As Danai Mupotsa (2011) reminds us, discourses of gender and sexuality are embedded in culture, tradition and nationalism, which in turn affect how women and their experiences are interpreted. The state, the media, the church and other similarly dominant institutions contribute to the generation of public scripts for reading gender and sexuality, which are then sustained by circulation. Popular scripts circulate as narratives, songs, utterances and jokes among other modes consumed in everyday life (Barber 2018, Ogola 2017). As demonstrated in the example cited earlier, humour is a form of articulating social anxieties. Laura Oyier’s audacity to exist outside a heteronormative expectation of femininity made her an object of ridicule in ways that aimed to discipline her. My engagement with this aspect of the public script is a mode of illuminating patterns of representation in the Kenyan mediascape. My assertion is that by examining how popular narratives circulate as public scripts, I can critically engage the intersections between familiar and well-known stereotypes of femininity; and the disruptions posed by the women represented in such narratives.

In the chapters that follow, I select examples from radio drama, tabloid newspapers and social media. I find that these three media sites map out a general pattern of representation of femininity, while also making apparent temporal and spatial connections between state-endorsed media content and public articulations of the same. While other media forms — such as television — exist, radio drama, tabloid and entertainment newspapers and social media each represent historical standpoints in Kenyan media history that allow for a tracking/tracing of practices in relation to gender and sexuality. I also selected a range of forms — audio, written and visual texts — that help me navigate a variety of narrative terrains and how each engages with central themes of morality, sexuality and gender. The corpus of data that I deal with is based on a set of themes that usefully characterise the public script in relation to normative constructions of romance and intimacy, marriage and (in)fidelity, and other sexual and gendered behaviour in popular culture and media. I also explore the possibilities of counter-readings, and what transgression of norms in heteronormativity looks like. In this case, I use feminist criticism to articulate what happens when women refuse to fit neatly into normalised heterosexual categorisations. I explore scandal, shame and hypervisibility, both as punishment and transgression.

Specifically, radio drama provides a glimpse into state broadcasting, and allows me to engage with the colonial context of its beginnings in Kenya. I use radio to map constructions of modern African identities in a colonial past and a postcolonial present. The radio plays I analyse offer normative fictional narratives of gender and sexuality, presented via a state-endorsed mainstream media channel. These are produced for the Kenyan state broadcaster Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), from the 1990s and early 2000s. I have deliberately selected plays from this period because of the political context in which they are steeped. I examine a radio programme called Radio Theatre, which was produced for KBC from 1982.5 The plays were aired weekly, with each radio play based on a theme drawing on everyday life in Kenya. The moral narrative forms the structure on which these plays were based as they pursued seemingly simplistic themes on marriage, love and sex. I consider the metanarrative of the moral narrative present in all the plays and link it to the ideological function of the plays in a heteropatriarchal state. Arguing that this moral narrative presents a form of public script from which audiences are encouraged to read, I critically analyse the ideological assumptions embedded in the plays produced by drawing together what I perceive as ‘patterns’ in the production of morally acceptable themes. It is interesting to note how much even randomly selected radio plays enact heteronormative discourses. In one play titled My Aunty Weds (2002), two women get married in order to honour the lineage of a man who has passed away without leaving behind an heir. There is a clear lack of intimacy between the women, and a general understanding that the younger woman is free to get into relationships with men in order to bear children for the dead man’s family. Such an adaptation of a cultural practice that aligns with a national heteronormative framework, demonstrates the dominant patterns of production of sexual narratives in Kenya. I do take note of radio’s intimate connection to the everyday lives of listeners that makes it possible to explore such narratives in ways that may deviate from the normative script (see Fardon and Furniss 2000; Gunner, Ligaga and Moyo 2011; Gunner 2019).

In addition to radio, I look at a number of newspaper articles from different sources in the genres of tabloid and entertainment reporting. This is to signal a general mode of representing women as sensational objects — objects of derision as well as of curiosity, as seen in the example at the beginning of this chapter. The examples I use are drawn randomly from the period between 2010 and 2019, to highlight what I argue is a continuation of conversations already apparent in the media about women. For instance, in reading media representations of women in public in the 1960s and 1970s, Christine Obbo (1980) signals how punitive the discourses on particular kinds of women were. To exemplify, she explores how single women in Uganda and Kenya were portrayed in binary moralistic terms that aimed to shame and call to order those who were identified as deviant. These trends of representation seem to have persisted, and warrant another look. In the context of contemporary Kenya, similar to what Obbo described in a 1960s East African context, the bulk of newspaper articles circulating show themes that lament the increasing number of single women, who are deemed problematic. Titles such as “Who will marry the increasing number of single mothers in Kenya”;6 “Why most Kenyan women want to have boyfriends but not husbands”;7 and “How young Kenyan women suffer in the hands of a sponsor [sugar daddy]”8 are not uncommon in most entertainment pages of mainstream newspapers and in tabloid newspapers. Such titles demonstrate a superficial engagement with women’s issues, issues which double up as entertainment. These titles are sensationalist, alarmist, didactic or even simplistic. They offer varying accounts of sexual scandal and melodrama, with the ultimate aim of sensationalising the stories and creating spectacle. In many ways, they represent gender and sexuality in ways that are arguably sexist and stereotypical. However, I am aware that tabloid newspapers generally have all too easily been dismissed as trashy due to their dominant style of reporting. As a growing body of scholarship on popular culture in Africa is beginning to show, tabloids, like other forms of popular culture, tap into informal networks of knowledge in order to engage with publics previously excluded from the mainstream public spheres (Barber 1997). Herman Wasserman’s work on tabloid journalism in South Africa offers a comprehensive sense of how the tabloid genre can be taken seriously (2010; see also Strelitz and Steenveld 2005; Steenveld and Strelitz 2010). If this is the case, then a deconstruction of the public script in the tabloid genre makes it possible to generate alternative understandings of newspaper reports that I analyse.

Lastly, I choose to read digital platforms as generative of public scripts. An increasing number of young women have become digitally perceptive, and in a context such as Africa, this stands at odds with largely rural, traditionalist cultures, huge class divisions and a normative embrace of gender roles. Even so, more women are taking to online platforms to curate versions of themselves as part of their embrace of global trends, but also as expressions of freedom (Ligaga 2012). While I argue that the digital space remains heterogeneous enough to register varying meanings of femininity, I acknowledge that the public script of morality dictates how the visible bodies of young women that appear online are publicly interpreted. As such, the women who curate themselves online do so with the knowledge that they are going against normative practices of respectability. I use examples of hypervisible women as crucial in engaging a project of voicing and making visible femininity outside of dominant public scripts. I am interested in how these women weave into and out of discourses of acceptable and desired femininities. I choose to work with women in the public eye, such as Vera Sidika, Huddah Monroe and Akothee, who have been publicly dubbed ‘divas’ or ‘socialites’. I engage with the possibilities that digital media have created to allow such voices to emerge, disrupting the normative representations and expectations of desired femininity.

In this chapter, I explore the theoretical frameworks that I use to engage the various questions I pose above. I look at public scripts as derived from public sphere theories, and extend this reading as engendering ideas that control and police discourses of femininity. I argue that the public script exists in a context of controlled sexuality and where respectability defines constructions of morality. Using a cultural studies approach, I then engage with the idea of a disruptive public. This in many ways makes it possible to offer counternarratives to dominant ideology. Using visibility and popular culture as key sites of analysis, I argue that a disruptive public that exists in a violent context provides key clues into understanding questions of agency in Kenya. By reading these using the format of the moral narrative, the chapter then develops ideas of narrative continuity across genres. I explore ideas of transmediation and intertextuality to engage questions of...

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