ASAUK 2018

While discourses on gender and sexuality have become controversial in African social discourse due to the competing and defamatory public interest from the state and the Church, there is the tendency to lose out on how the domestic space contrives and participates in such productions. Yet, as an ever-expanding area of African feminist advocacy, sexuality analysis remains largely understudied. This paper examines the domestic space for the ways that it reproduces, sanctions, challenges and disrupts specific discursive productions on sexuality. Drawing from interviews with twenty Ghanaian families, the paper contributes to scholarship by arguing that the processuality of sexual scripts linked to moral scripts and cultural taboos produce complex tensions and ambivalences with implications for cultural authenticity, power relations, fear mongering and social persecution. The analysis shows that sexuality, much like gender, is deeply discursive, processual, fluid and shaped by culture and history requiring scholars to engage in deep reflections on how discourses of sexuality inscribe themselves into the social and moral fabric to shape our individual actions and behaviors. Taking evidence from Ghana, we argue that an important question remains eminent against the background of transformation for harnessing the potentials of the domestic space which prescribes gender-specific behaviors and expectations between men and women across families.