Abstract
In this article, I explore a range of intersections between the ideological-material legacies of a dictatorial regime and representations of female sexuality in Malawian fiction. I am particularly interested in using literary narratives to examine how fiction writers explore the congruencies and disjunctures amongst outright political dictatorship and the impact on bodies and behaviours of state-inflected institutions such as ‘the family’, along with discourses such as gender, culture and religion that are commonly mobilised in the service of national identity. Focusing on Tiyambe Zeleza’s Smouldering Charcoal and James Ng’ombe’s Sugarcane with Salt, I investigate how the authors’ portrayal of female sexuality contest at the same time as they reproduce received, normative ‘truths’ about female sexualities. By focusing on female sexual agency, desire and pleasure, this article also examines class-inflected intergenerational differences between women’s conceptualisations of female sexualities as a construct that can be negotiated.
Highlights
The representation of women in Malawian literary imaginaries has almost always existed within binaristic representations of the ‘whore’ living at the margins of society versus the ‘Madonna’, the ideal enduring wife and mother who would sacrifice anything for her family (Sagawa 1996)
Representation of sexualities, especially female, is often shrouded by a myriad of taboos and essentialisms as well as political and cultural objections as it is framed within cultural silences, which regard talking about issues of sexuality as taboo
Even in the broader picture of African literature, representations of sexualities have adopted all sorts of http://www.literator.org.za restrictions and taboos
Summary
The representation of women in Malawian literary imaginaries has almost always existed within binaristic representations of the ‘whore’ living at the margins of society versus the ‘Madonna’, the ideal enduring wife and mother who would sacrifice anything for her family (Sagawa 1996). Banda’s regime took advantage of the already disempowered position of Malawian women to exploit them and to further place women’s sexuality under men’s control.
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