Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Human Rights, Society, and the State

Lydia Boyd, Emily Burrill, Lydia Boyd, Emily Burrill

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780299327439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In recent decades, a more formalized and forceful shift has emerged in the legislative realm when it comes to gender and sexual justice in Africa. This rigorous, timely volume brings together leading and rising scholars across disciplines to evaluate these ideological struggles and reconsider the modern history of human rights on the continent. Broad in geographic coverage and topical in scope, chapters investigate such subjects as marriage legislation in Mali, family violence experienced by West African refugees, sex education in Uganda, and statutes criminalizing homosexuality in Senegal. These case studies highlight the nuances and contradictions in the varied ways key actors make arguments for or against rights. They also explore how individual countries draft and implement laws that attempt to address the underlying problems.
Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa details how legal efforts in the continent can often be moralizing enterprises, illuminating how these processes are closely tied to notions of ethics, personhood, and citizenship. The contributors provide new appraisals of recent events, with fresh arguments about the relationships between local and global fights for rights. This interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in African studies, anthropology, history, and gender studies.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and the State in Africa / Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill
• 1. Legislating Marriagein Postcolonial Mali: A History of the Present / Emily Burrill
• 2. Early Marriage and the Debates over Gender-Based Rights in Niger / Adeline Masquelier
• 3. Where Are the Women? Gendered Experiences of Land Resource Management in the Time of Climate Change in Southern Burkina Faso / Elisabeth Kago Ilboudo Nébié
• 4. Sex, Schooling, and the Paradox of the Readmission Policy in Malawi / Rachel Silver
• 5. The Debate over Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Uganda: Barriers to Vernacularizing Reproductive Rights / Eunice Musiime and Leah Eryenyu
• 6. Family Violence in the Refugee Claims of Asylum Seekers from West Africa / Charlotte Walker-Said
• 7. Colonial Legacies, Electoral Politics, and the Production of (Anti)homosexuality in Senegal / Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, Ellen E. Foley, and Ndack Diop
• 8. Making Rights Visible: The Embodied Nature of Debates over Sexual and Gender-Based Rights in Uganda / Lydia Boyd
• Epilogue: Entanglements of Law, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa / Dorothy L. Hodgson
• Contributors
• Index