BA Ancient History and History

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This course will consider histories of gender and sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial and post-colonial periods, roughly from 1880 until the present. During the past twenty-five years, scholars have argued that gender is less a matter of biological fact than a historically and culturally contingent construction. Institutions like woman-woman marriage and various gender-transgressive identities suggest that many African cultures do not divide people into “men” and “women” in the same way Western cultures have done. At the same time, the wide-ranging political and economic transformations of the last century have had profound implications for gender and sexuality, causing changes in the sexual division of labor and in domestic life. We will therefore consider gender and sexuality in Africa both as a set of identities and practices and as part of wider questions of work, domesticity, and social control.

• Introduce students to key debates in gender history and theory
• Provide students with an overview of modern African history through the lens of gender studies
• Underscore the importance of gender to political-economic approaches to history
• Provide a survey of a number of different African societies across the past 125 years.

• Increased familiarity with independent research in African history, through research projects on specific societies
• Exposure to primary sources on African gender history
• Greater experience at presenting historical material orally and in writing
• New familiarity with the historiography of gender and sexuality

• Applying theoretical approaches from gender theory to a range of empirical case studies,
• Ability to compare case material from diverse societies,
• Discern arguments from academic writing
• Practice applying approaches from one author to a different case

• Prioritise tasks,
• Identify arguments in scholarly writing,  
• Analyse texts for the learning challenges the present for their peers
• Write critically, and
• Engage in comparative analysis. 

• Critical reading ability
• Clear, precise writing ability
• Ability to engage in critical discussions
• Greater familiarity with African histories and societies

Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (New York: Zed Books, 1987).

Dorothy L. Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher, eds. Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, eds., Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Lynn M. Thomas, The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).