Gender And Sexuality In Senegalese Societies PDF Download

Across West Africa, Senegalese women enjoy the reputation of being good at the unique ways they take care of themselves, their households, and romantic partners through their enactment of jongé. This dissertation explores the cultural practices involved in jongé, including both discursive and embodied practices around womanhood, femininity, and sexuality. Practicing jongé includes, among other elements, cooking fancy meals, showcasing an idealized feminine identity, and performing eroticized sexuality through the consumption of various erotic paraphernalia. As a practice that permeates the daily lives of Senegalese women, the digital world, and popular culture, jongé has become a binding place to understand Senegalese women's identities.Through close reading, feminist ethnography, and critical discourse analysis, this dissertation shows how Senegalese women negotiate agency, power, and pleasure as they engage with jongé in their daily lives to find ways through the gendered expectations of their society. To make sense of this cultural practice among contemporary Senegalese women, the dissertation aims to think through the language and theories that emanate from it. Ultimately, the research explores the aesthetics of jongé and its significance in the Senegalese cultural imaginary as an agentive practice enabling women to gain power and pleasure and navigate their socio-economic marginalization through different bodily performances. Second, the dissertation brings forward diasporic women's narrative of jongé and demonstrates that the practice is an important place of construction and transmission of Senegalese notions about gender and sexuality and a discursive space where diasporic women negotiate its meaning while performing their transnational subjectivities. Lastly, women's performance of jonge̹ through the consumption of erotic paraphernalia exposes the cosmopolitanism of the practice. It reveals the liberatoriness, pleasurability, and intimacy of women's interactions and discussions about jongé as they navigate the various facets of their sexuality and explore erotic technologies while engaging in confidence with daily social issues that mark their lives as women.