“We are not enkanyakuai…. We are just girls.”

Abstract

“Embodying Schoolgirlhood,” uses contested accounts of emuratare oo ntoyie, girls’ circumcision, and enkanyakuai, a female social category, to illustrate how schoolgirls’ “developing” adolescent bodies complicate their performance and negotiation of schoolgirlhood. The chapter illustrates a key tension: schoolgirlhood proceeds as girl-effects logic would predict by destabilizing conventional meanings and rescripting girlhood as a place of possibility for girls who go to school rather than a relatively short life stage that ends abruptly at circumcision, yet this logic cannot account for Maasai schoolgirls’ desire for community identity and belonging. Global and local assumptions about schoolgirls’ abilities to “call the shots” collide with schoolgirls’ actual capacity to do so; both miss schoolgirls’ desire to be independent and to deeply belong as “Maasai” among Maasai.