All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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‘Kenya has become a society inflamed by sexual desire’. Transformations in sexuality over three generations
| To understand sexual relations, desire and social organisations of sexuality in contemporary Nairobi, it is important to analyse them in relation to transformation in sexuality over the last century. In this paper I aim to write a macro-social narrative about how changes in sexual relations connect to Kenya’s social transformations. I focus this genealogy on the way societal processes affected gender relations, sexual relations and sexual desire. In short, societal processes such as male labour migration starting in the early twentieth century gradually impacted more and more on social organisation of sexuality, such as on the institution of marriage. Secondly, when these marriage patterns changed, the practical and symbolic relations between women and men changed. Eventually, ideas of womanhood and manhood have shifted. This process of transformation, in turn, opened up new possibilities and new forms of desire and relating. Nevertheless, the social transformations have caused uneasiness concerning the shifting notions of gender and sexuality and therefore to issues of cultural heritage. At issue here is that socio-cultural institutions like marriage are a key form of social cohesion, for structuring gender roles and gendered divisions of labour. If economic or political processes affect these institutions, invariably gender roles shift, which, in turn, affect the practical and symbolic relations between women and men. These shifts imply changes in power relations that do not go undisputed. Moreover, since sexual organisations are often experienced as fundamental to society, moral reactions have characterised and accompanied processes of transformations in sexuality. That is why discourses articulating a certain nostalgia about sexuality in ‘the olden days’ are influential in Nairobi, criticising new gender roles, sexual relations and sexual desire as central to self among urban young adults.
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