Roundtable on Dina Ligaga's Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media

Abstract

One of the fundamental issues that Dina Ligaga addresses in her book Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media (2020), is how the Kenyan public culture controls Kenyan femininities. It is a question so simple that I fell into the trap of assuming that its answer(s) would be straightforward. As a relatively young scholar whose research and teaching are also at the crossroads of gender, sexuality and popular culture, I have seen the same question being posed by various Zimbabwean scholars. Zimbabwean scholarship has attempted to reflect on how Zimbabwean popular media works as a breeding ground for enforcing and displaying masculine identities (Chiweshe and Bhatasara 2013), while at the same time silencing Zimbabwean women’s voices through its misogynistic predispositions (Mateveke and Chikafa 2020). Through seven chapters, Dina Ligaga explores contemporary Kenya’s politics of visibility and how this impinges on the subjectivities of Kenyan women. Ligaga goes on to consider the role played by stereotypes in constructing what is deemed ideal womanhood and sexuality in Kenya. If, as revealed in the book, stereotypes are the chains that are effectively used to restrain and to dictate notions of femininity to the Kenyan public female figure, then radio drama is the physical enactment of those social restrictions. In her chapter which looks at radio and the construction of African womanhood, Ligaga reflects on the power of radio to air public constructions of Kenyan womanhood. Ligaga successfully provides a bilateral historical account of the uses of the institutionalised form of radio drama in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Across these two distinct historical contexts, the development of conservative notions of sexuality is constant. The author intricately links the formulaic structure of the radio drama genre to dominant, state-endorsed, narratives about women. The analysis is expertly manoeuvered across genres to consider the role played by the tabloid newspaper in its representation of Kenyan womanhood. Ligaga persuasively argues that the spectacles and scandals that drive the tabloid newspaper genre are forms of surveillance over “unruly femininities”. The book accounts for how Kenyan tabloid genres unsympathetically crucify “unruly women” through gossip and sexual scandal narratives. Ligaga’s further exploration of consumption, good-time girls and violence in public discourses, and her analysis of women celebrities, hypervisibility and digital subjectivity in Kenya, raises her most powerful but devastating analysis. It is powerful because she firmly brings to the fore a subject with which not only conservative Kenya, but conservative African countries such as Zimbabwe, are not ready to publicly engage. Ligaga’s research on the “good-time girl” and the social media female celebrity indicts Kenyan popular media for its sexism and misogyny. The analysis is also devastating