Ambiguous Pleasures
eBook - ePub

Ambiguous Pleasures

Sexuality and Middle Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi

  1. 322 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Ambiguous Pleasures

Sexuality and Middle Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi

About this book

Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

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Yes, you can access Ambiguous Pleasures by Rachel Spronk in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Introduction
  8. Chapter I: The study of sexuality
  9. Chapter II: Young professionals: emblems of social transformation
  10. Chapter III: Society in flames: sexuality in the context of AIDS
  11. Chapter IV: Ambiguous pleasures: sexual desire, career, and femininity
  12. Chapter V: Ambiguous pleasures: sex, riches, and masculinity
  13. Chapter VI: Sign of the times: media and the therapeutic ethos of romantic love
  14. Chapter VII: Conclusion: sexuality and its ambiguous pleasures
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index