Fashioning sexuality in popular culture
Convenors: Sandra Manuel, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane & Rachel Spronk, University of Amsterdam
This panel aims at bringing together a range of empirical studies that focus on the making and making of sexuality through various forms of popular culture. From print media, local films, TV, social media and other spaces of popular culture like fashion and advertising, sexuality is used as a tool for communicating moral meanings, for exploring boundaries and for self-expression. From the popular Dear Dolly columns half way the previous century up to the current flamboyant display of celebrities, sexuality is imagined and reimagined over the decades in many different ways. Sexuality is a personal affair and sexuality is a particular dense transfer point of cultural, religious and social sensibilities through which groups and individuals distinguish themselves vis-a-vis others. Sexuality is therefore often studied as dependent on relations of power that limit self-expression to normative conceptions. Instead, we invite papers that focus on the ways normative structures both limit and enable expressions of sexuality, as we believe that popular media provide an analytical vantage point to study this ambiguous fashioning of sexuality. Such an approach opens new avenues in the study of sexuality in Africa as it goes beyond approaches where sexuality is imagined and (re)presented as a social problem that needs to be fixed. We invite papers that investigate how normative understandings of sexuality may be reinforced; how boundaries are explored and how new ways of envisioning sexuality are sounded out. We invite papers that focus on the experiential qualities of sexuality - on subjective experiences of sex that are linked to the body and to emotions - and on technologies of the self; what kind of aesthetic choices and sensorial practices are implicated in popular culture? How are qualities such as pleasure, chastity, self-care, affection, self-indulgence and much more, mediated, by whom, for whom? We welcome historically grounded papers that discuss the link between sexuality and popular culture highlighting continuity and change.
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