14:00 - 15:30
Room: Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Stream: Gender and Sexuality
Chair/s:
Juliet Gilbert
Enchanted selves, desirable others: dress, sexuality and technologies of enchantment among young Bamileke woman in Yaounde, Cameroon
Ewa Majczak
Oxford University, Brussels

In this paper I examine how two generations of Bamileke woman navigate different demands of desire

Young Bamileke woman living in Yaounde avowedly practice self-restrain in sexual matters. This implies refusing rather frequent sexual offers from a wide range of desirable and less desirable male candidates. Sexual self-restraint is sought for not only as a way of fashioning distinction within generation - from a category of less respectable young woman (filles legeres). As such young woman discursively use self-restraint as a matter of competition and prestige in friendly and not so friendly exchanges with one another.

Yet young Bamileke also secretly recognise mastering one’s sexual desires is a challenging enterprise and reluctantly admit their strategies fail in the very moments they should have kept their desires at bay. Feelings of failure in terms of desired sexual self-mastery are however mitigated by equally desired - if less openly admitted - experiences of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure legitimates the failure of keeping desire at bay and is seen as important aspect within a ‘serious relationship with a virile man’. If young woman do not talk much about sexual pleasure with their same-sex peers and even less with their mothers, some admit to talk about it with their ‘guys’ (gars).

Young woman then strive for sexual pleasure within exclusive relationships they wish to lead to a monogamous marriage. Whereas they might consider their mothers as prude, their mothers as married woman are caught in between similar tensions of pleasure and restraint albeit in a different way. For them to deal with sexual dissatisfaction some pursue(d) paths of pleasure outside the confines of polygamous or seemingly monogamous marriages, albeit in concealment. As such, I argue, continuity and difference across age groups as far as the pursuit of sexual pleasure is concerned is related less to generational difference than to marriage.

Young unmarried woman must navigate somewhat contradictory desires - to self-restraint and to indulge in pleasure - within the frame of exclusive relations they bitterly hope for. In order to do so, rather than making efforts at practicing one coherent sexual attitude, young woman fashion different attitudes, depending on the context. In order to practice different sexual attitudes they must learn who to enchant and disenchant, when and how. One way of navigating different demands of desire is through adapting various dressing styles that as technologies of enchantment conceal or reveal their own desires and seek to elicit or tame the desire of the other. I argue, that for young woman, not unlike for their mothers, sexuality as matter of bodily surface, like fashion is fleeting, and can be fashioned through dress.


Reference:
Tu-A17 Gender 2-P-003
Presenter/s:
Ewa Majczak
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Chair/s:
Juliet Gilbert
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
14:30 - 14:45
Session times:
14:00 - 15:30