Of Female Husbands and Boarding School Girls: Gender Bending in Unoma Azuah's Fiction - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Research in African Literatures Année : 2014

Of Female Husbands and Boarding School Girls: Gender Bending in Unoma Azuah's Fiction

Résumé

While Azuah's novel Sky-High Flames (2005) is firmly grounded in the Igbo sociological context, comprising ancestor worship, the cult of a female god dess, polygamy, and the levirate, the novel taps into the practice of female husbandry documented by cultural anthropologists (e.g., Sylvia Leith-Ross and Ifi Amadiume, whose theories I reassess), previous West African literary attempts at representing lesbian seduction, as well relational nexuses within the boarding school system. Nigerian feminisms, I argue, need to make room for the material factors of "doing lesbian." While pointing to this debut novel's reluctance to allow same-sex desire to develop, I also comment on womanly relationality, such as Azuah's displaced (auto)biographical vestment in her aunt's story, as well as on moments of intimacy between women, which augur the new Nigerian novel's capacity to comment on the economy of pleasures and on the way of constituting oneself as the moral subject of one's sexual conduct.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
ZABUSFemaleHusbands20109581.pdf (1.96 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-01988716 , version 1 (21-01-2019)

Licence

Copyright (Tous droits réservés)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01988716 , version 1

Citer

Chantal Zabus. Of Female Husbands and Boarding School Girls: Gender Bending in Unoma Azuah's Fiction. Research in African Literatures, 2014, Nigeria's Third-Generation Novel: Preliminary Theoretical Engagements, 9 (2), pp.93-107. ⟨hal-01988716⟩
92 Consultations
1527 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More