‘Why
are married women often the subject of ‘sex scandals’? Why is it
scandalous for a married woman to have an extra-marital affair, but for
men it demonstrates their ‘manhood’? Why is sexual desire ‘normal’ for
men, but ‘immoral’ for women? Why are young, university-educated women
framed in social media as money-grabbing hussies? What does it mean that
women are challenging social norms about their place in society, and
how they ought to conduct themselves? What are the social meanings of
the media’s cautionary tales about the punishment meted out to women
they mark as ‘wicked’, ‘loose’, ‘immoral’, ‘wild’, ‘difficult’,
‘educated’, when they step outside of patriarchal conventions of what it
means to be a Kenyan woman? Ligaga innovatively shows us how we can
read Kenyan women’s ‘transgressions’, not as moral flaws, but rather as
demonstrations of how they negotiate the constraints of national
cultural conventions, and in so doing offer new ways of ‘becoming’ a
Kenyan woman.’
