Contested femininity: strategies of resistance and reproduction across adolescence in northern Uganda

Abstract

Adolescent girls and young women have recently gained a central position in gender equality and development. However, little research investigates female experiences of the complex dynamics of both change and resistance to change in gender norms and structures. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Connell and Schippers to analyse longitudinal in-depth interviews, this paper explores how girls in northern Uganda learn, challenge and (re)produce patriarchal structures throughout the life-course and across social fields. It highlights the costs, consequences and benefits at stake in expressing hegemonic femininity and expands understanding of how adolescent girls and young women actively strategise to protect their wellbeing and create space for contestation. Findings call for greater attention to the coexistence of resistance to, and reproduction of, gender orders, and offer opportunities for additional research for theory building and programme implementation.

Keywords:

• Adolescence
• Africa
• gender-based violence
• gender norms
• reproductive health

Introduction

Over the past several years, adolescent girls and young women have steadily gained visibility in national and global campaigns for development and societal wellbeing in efforts to shed the stigma and vulnerability long associated with girlhood and to claim empowerment in its place. In 2011, Beyoncé proclaimed: ‘Who run the world? Girls!’ (Carter-Knowles 2011). Seemingly confirming her declaration, in 2013, 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for her advocacy for girls’ access to education (Clinton 2013). Then in March of 2017, ‘Fearless Girl’ appeared, fists on hips, to face down the Wall Street ‘Charging Bull’ (Collins 2017). Policy and programming have followed parallel paths. In 2011, the United Nations declared 11 October to be ‘International Day of the Girl’ (UNICEF 2016), and, in March of 2016, the US State Department published a Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls (U.S. Department of State 2016).

These initiatives call upon two discourses: one of power, the other of vulnerability. Malala not only fights for girls’ rights, she was shot in the process. Fearless Girl’s smallness is in sharp contrast with Charging Bull’s muscular and horned clout. While this focus on girls is inspiring and necessary, such idealised and simplistic representations have limited utility for policy and programming. Nevertheless, little research asks the more complex questions: What will enable Fearless Girl to tame the bull or change his course? Who are the invisible actors upon whom she relies? And what might she lose in opposing the bull instead of cooperating with him? This paper therefore investigates the often-coexisting dynamics of continuity, change and resistance to change in gender systems, advancing understanding of the complexity of girls’ negotiations with patriarchal norms and structures during the critical transition from childhood to early adulthood (10 to 19 years) and highlighting the importance of adolescence in shaping sexual and reproductive health outcomes and interventions.

The paper builds on research conducted from 2012 to 2014 as part of the 6.5-year Gender Roles, Equality and Transformations (GREAT) project in northern Uganda implemented by Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) in partnership with Save the Children and Pathfinder International. Findings demonstrate that adolescent girls negotiate coexisting patriarchal and alternative norms across social fields as they journey towards adulthood, with vital consequences for their wellbeing and life trajectories (Chantelois et al. 2016; Lundgren et al. 2019).¹

Gender norms in post-conflict northern Uganda

For this paper, a purposive sample of the overall data was analysed to seek insights into how and why girls reproduce and challenge patriarchy across the life-course, particularly during the transition to marriage or parenting within the context of post-conflict northern Uganda. From 1987 to 2006, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) waged war on the Ugandan government and its own people, disrupting social, economic and political life, particularly of northern communities. Both the LRA and the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) committed serious human rights abuses (Branch 2004; Akhavan 2005; ICG 2005, 11). After more than a decade of confinement in camps, most internally displaced persons returned home by 2012 (UNHCR 2012) to rebuild social, cultural, civic and physical infrastructure lost during war and displacement.

Conflict and displacement disrupted social institutions and reinforced harmful cultural and social norms that contribute to perpetuation of gender inequality and violence against women and girls (Horn 2009; Amnesty International 2010; Kinyanda et al. 2010). Violence is often normalised and socially condoned (Bukuluki et al. 2013, 87), with high rates of domestic violence and forced sex with intimate partners (Stark et al. 2010). Early marriage is a common survival strategy for girls and family members struggling with poverty. However, marriage often fails to ensure security, as young girls and women who lack status are especially vulnerable to domestic violence, isolation (Bruce 2005; UBOS 2012) and challenges in inheritance, property ownership and other forms of socio-economic violence (Adoko and Levine 2004; Rugadya, Nsamba-Gayiiya and Kamusiime 2008; World Bank 2009). Consequently, girls currently transitioning through adolescence inhabit a world in which communal, political and economic systems are unstable, tension surrounding gender roles and power dynamics is heightened, and social norms are markedly in flux.

Theoretical grounding

Our analysis of the underlying gender norms in northern Uganda draws on R.W. Connell’s relational view of masculinity and femininity (Connell 1983) and Mimi Schippers’s femininity-focused theory (Schippers 2007). Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity highlights a contextually and temporally rooted form of masculinity that ‘structures and legitimates hierarchical gender relations’ (Messerschmidt 2012, 58) and that attains an ascendant position through cultural persuasion and consent (Connell 1987; Connell 1995; Messerschmidt 2012, 58). Responding to the dearth of comparable femininity-focused theory, Schippers modifies Connell’s definitions and conceptualises ‘hegemonic femininity’ (Schippers 2007, 85) as follows:

Hegemonic femininity consists of the characteristics defined as womanly that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary relationship to hegemonic masculinity and that, by doing so, guarantee the dominant position of men and the subordination of women. (Schippers 2007, 94)

Within this definition, it is no longer simple difference from and inferiority to hegemonic masculinity that characterises particular femininities but their relationship to ‘the idealised relationship between masculinity and femininity’ (Schippers 2007, 94).

Furthermore, Schippers proposes two additional concepts: ‘pariah’ and ‘alternative’ femininities. In order for the power structure among masculinities and femininities to be maintained, women’s embodiment of the qualities associated with hegemonic masculinity produces not merely ‘subordinate’ femininities, as Connell suggests (Connell 1983), but highly scorned ‘pariah’ femininities (Schippers 2007, 95). At the same time, ‘alternative’ femininities and masculinities exist that are not necessarily reflections of ‘dominance and subordination between women and men’ (Schippers 2007, 98). In this paper, we take up Schippers’s challenge to focus on the structures that legitimate gendered ‘power relations and distributions of resources’ as ‘the true measures of gender inequality’ (Schippers 2007, 100–101). We support the notion that addressing gender inequality will require our understanding of how, why and in what contexts girls and women succumb to hegemonic femininity or struggle to overcome it. It is with these concerns in mind that we also engage with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of domination.

Bourdieu and transformation of gender systems

Over the past two decades, some Anglophone feminists have problematised gender domination and (to a lesser extent) the transformation of patriarchal orders using Pierre Bourdieu’s core concepts (McCall 1992; Laberge 1995; Skeggs 1997; McNay 1999; Lovell 2000; Adkins and Skeggs 2004; Chambers 2005; McLeod 2005; Krais 2006; Huppatz 2009; Thorpe 2009; Miller 2014). However, their insights have yet to significantly influence international development interventions. We suggest that feminist interpretations of Bourdieu’s work provide tools by which to explore the mechanisms guiding the construction of and resistance to hegemonic, pariah and alternative femininities that shape girls’ health outcomes across adolescence and beyond.

Bourdieu’s interest in understanding how systems of domination are transmitted across generations and within individuals and groups objectively harmed by those systems led to conceptualisation of habitus, field and capital. Habitus has been described as,

… the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel, and act in determinate ways, which then guide them in their creative responses to their constraints and solicitations of their extant milieu. (Wacquant 2005, 316)

It develops in response to field, or ‘a sphere of action that places certain limits on those who act within it, according to their status within that field’; fields operate according to internal power relations that shape its structure by prioritising different forms of capital, or ‘collections of resources’ (Chambers 2005, 331) and enabling individual subject positions differential status and accordant access to capital, whether economic, cultural, social or symbolic (Bourdieu 1993).

Bourdieu's work offers a neglected lens for interrogating gender-transformative programming by highlighting how capital, field and habitus shape and change within particular gender systems and where openings for transformation exist. Recent feminist engagement with Bourdieu (see above) has focused primarily on post-industrial contexts and often neglected adolescence except in school settings. Therefore, this paper complements existing feminist engagement with Bourdieu by examining negotiation of a gendered social order throughout adolescence and in low-resource and post-conflict northern Uganda.

Methodology

Participants

Our analysis draws on a purposive sample of 10 girls who participated in the GREAT study in six sub-counties in Amuru and Lira districts in northern Uganda from 2012 to 2014. In the initial study, 60 participants (30 girls and 30 boys) between the ages of 10 and 19 years at onset were interviewed four times at six-month intervals. The study sought to evaluate an intervention designed to mobilise communities and change norms in order to improve gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health outcomes during adolescence, which is recognised as a key stage of establishing patterns of future lifestyle and behaviour (Viner et al. 2012). Participants were selected using purposive sampling to represent a range of experiences related to group membership, employment, romantic relationship status, parity, living arrangements and rural/urban location in the transition to young adulthood.

In order to better understand how girls construct, reproduce and contest gender inequality, we narrowed the sample to 10 representative girls (three 10–14-year-olds; three 15–19-year-olds; and four 15–19-year-olds who were married, pregnant or with at least one child) who shared their experiences and perspectives in depth during interviews and whose life-stories reflect diverse types of challenges and support. From these 10, we selected three married, pregnant or parenting participants’ stories to analyse in-depth across all interview rounds and then to re-tell: first, because they illustrate in the most richness the trends identified across the cohort; second, because the data indicate that these life-stages are of particular importance in gender norm negotiation and in determining life outcomes.

Procedure

Prior to the commencement of the study, ethical clearance was obtained from the Georgetown University Institutional Review Board, the Makerere University School of Public Health Institutional Review Board and the Uganda National Council of Science and Technology. All participants provided informed assent (adolescents under 18 years) or informed consent (adults, parents/legal guardians of assenting minors, young women emancipated due to marriage or the birth of a child/children). For illiterate or low-literate participants, consents/assents were read out loud and confirmed with a thumbprint in the presence of a literate adult unaffiliated with the study. No respondent was paid for participation. Interviewers provided referrals to health, legal and social services after each interview. Retention was high, with approximately 8% of participants lost to follow-up.

An exploratory and descriptive study design was employed. In-depth interviewing, complemented with projective techniques, games and other participatory techniques, helped to actively engage adolescents and young people in talking freely about their attitudes, feelings and experiences. Interview guides were pretested and translated from English to Acholi and Langi. Interviews were conducted by experienced local interviewers in Luo, audio taped, transcribed and translated into English by staff with Ugandan partner organisations. Confidentiality was protected using participant codes, pseudonyms in all publications (including in this paper) and by storing all raw and processed data under lock and key and/or password-protected computers linked to Georgetown University’s encrypted network.

Analysis

A combination of grounded theory and content analysis guided the qualitative analysis of life-course interviews (Strauss and Corbin 1994). Using code reports (generated with ATLAS.ti 7) and matrices, we performed content analysis in order to limit the scope of concepts and view change over time. Guiding questions include whether and how gender norms were changing and whether and how they were influencing household relationships, sexual and reproductive health and violence.

Using grounded theory during the initial analysis enabled us to identify unanticipated factors, patterns and relationships and to view them in participants’ own terms. This led us to select Connell, Schippers and Bourdieu as the bases for analysing systems of domination for the purpose of this paper. Here, we hand-coded interview transcripts and analysed emergent patterns across age cohorts and as a whole over time using a categorical-content approach (Beal 2013). Guiding questions pertained to construction and embodiment of hegemonic femininity, habitus, field, capital and girls’ strategies for navigating those dynamics and assuring their wellbeing across key transition moments in the life-course. The first two authors of this study were involved in the study design, and all were involved in data analysis.

Limitations of the study specific to this paper stem primarily from the retrospective application of questions to existing data. For instance, school, religion, bride price and girls’ economic activities were marginal in our interview guides and are likely underrepresented in our analysis of gender and power transformations. Additionally, results from the study are grounded in the northern Uganda context and may not be generalisable to urban Kampala or to other socio-economic contexts.

Results

The results of this sub-analysis of the larger cohort data clarify common pathways/archetypes of navigating gender hegemony and habitus in northern Uganda.

Girls in the sample described learning to embody and navigate gendered norms early – even before puberty accelerated the social significance of their gender aspects. Sometimes, this occurred explicitly, with peers and elders instructing them regarding expected speech, work, dress and ways of relating to others. Gender norms were also learned implicitly, with older girls and women modelling obedience to men, adoption of caretaking roles and limitation of their voice and movement. While some girls questioned the limitations, these expectations placed on them many adopted gendered norms – particularly the inegalitarian distribution of chores and time to study – without mention of contestation.

The concept of habitus explains how and why it is an ordinary, everyday practice for girls to reproduce patriarchal gender norms across the life-course. Describing habitus, Wacquant notes that ‘… each of its layers operates as a prism through which later experiences are filtered and subsequent strata of dispositions overlaid’ (Wacquant 2005, 317). Consequently, early life experiences carry disproportionate weight in laying down the underlying structure of the habitus. Below, Brenda’s and Josephine’s definitions of an ‘ideal woman’ and an ‘ideal man’ (provided during our first interviews with them and reflective of the trend across participants) highlight this, as we see these specifically gendered dispositions well-developed by the onset of adolescence.

An ‘ideal woman’

She should keep time in her home, care for the children, be disciplined. She should not be a thief; she should not drink alcohol. She stays at home, tender and obedient. (Brenda, age 10)

A woman should be obedient by listening to her husband. She should also be respectful. She should care for the children and [be] hardworking in her home. She must be humble in her talking, faithful to her husband, and welcoming. (Josephine, age 19)

An ‘ideal man’

This man should drink alcohol. He should be a provider, should always consult the wife, cares for the children. He should not be rude; he [should] not be violent; he should be obedient; he should be strong to dig for his family; he should be tender and should also be a leader. (Brenda, age 10)

He should be hardworking; he should be faithful to his wife; he should be able to discuss issues of the family with the wife; he should pay school fees; he is one who is a leader in his home, and he is powerful in a way that he can afford for his family. (Josephine, age 19)

The gendered dispositions that girls like Brenda developed by early adolescence are not random; rather, they are reflective of the requirements of the prevailing forms of hegemonic femininity and masculinity. A comparison of Brenda’s and Josephine’s definitions of an ‘ideal woman’ with their definitions of an ‘ideal man’ reveals how the characteristics that they aspire to embody as women reconstructs the ‘hierarchical and complementary relationship to hegemonic masculinity’ (Schippers 2007, 94).

Girls in this study began learning to embody hegemonic femininity early in life through gendered practices across fields. As the above quote from Brenda illustrates, early in adolescence, they recounted gendered practices pertaining to work, mobility in private and public space, etiquette, speech and participation in cultural practices. They knew which chores were acceptable for girls (cooking, washing dishes, laundry, babysitting, applying dung coating to building walls) and which were acceptable for boys (tying up the animals and cleaning the exterior compound). As they entered puberty, they began to regulate their time in public space, avoiding the market, bars and restaurants and being away from home in the evening. They invested time in preparing meals, caring for younger siblings and properly welcoming visitors. Through these processes, they learned to inhabit gendered positions within each field, not primarily as child, sibling or citizen, but as daughter, sister and – perhaps even more influentially and pre-reflexively – as future wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Thus, the habitus that girls form instils in them knowledge of the gendered expectations and competencies required to attain hegemonic femininity in adulthood.

This critical socialisation through interpersonal relationships, particularly parents and peers, points to the importance of strengthening social networks and leveraging of positive role models as part of adolescent health interventions

Dynamics of resistance and reproduction

Bourdieu offers several possibilities for transforming the habitus: field crossing; regulated liberties; and reflexivity. First, Bourdieu argues that entering new fields in which there is misalignment between the habitus and the new field’s structure allows for elements of the habitus to break through to the level of consciousness and then be questioned and reconfigured (Bourdieu 1998). Second, Bourdieu suggests that regulated liberties offer opportunities to challenge existing norms governing the habitus, but that they do so without altering the power structure therein. Clare Chambers describes regulated liberties as

actions that arise in the context of the existing social order, but which subvert or resignify it in some way. Bourdieu’s regulated liberties occur when the disadvantaged or oppressed subversively apply oppressive or unjust norms, questioning and resisting their dominant meaning. (Chambers 2005, 338)

Lastly, drawing from Bourdieu’s work on reflexive sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and elsewhere, feminists have variously suggested that consciousness-raising offers a necessary complement to the above strategies (Laberge 1995; Skeggs 1997; McLeod 2005; Chambers 2005; Thorpe 2009). We now trace three girls’ experiences with field crossing, regulated liberties and reflexivity across later adolescence, noting moments of transformation or reconstitution of gender hegemony.

Edith: reproducing patriarchy in a context of habitus–field alignment

We met Edith as a 17-year-old girl who had begun cohabiting with her husband and subsequently dropped out of school two months prior to our interview. During our last interview with her, she described how she came to marry her husband, then an acquaintance:

… One day, I left the garden late, and I was going back home. He and the brother attacked me on my way home, and he forced me into his house, and he locked me inside, and I didn’t go back home. I got scared, and you know when a girl sleeps out, it’s hard for you to go back home in the morning and face your parents … I had already had sex with him, and I spent a night with him. I feared that if I went back home, they were going to beat me, and I agreed to stay with him … I didn’t choose him, but he forced me … I accepted and because he also came with his brother and overpowered me. (Edith, age 19)

To understand Edith’s reaction to the violence that initiated her marriage, seemingly against her own interests, we consider the patriarchal habitus that developed over her childhood and early adolescence. In her gender analysis of Bourdieu’s work, Chambers writes:

Patriarchy operates significantly through the construction of desires and thoughts … compliance is secured more easily by ruling out options before they are considered, so that people never come to choose. (Chambers 2005, 330)

Edith’s patriarchal habitus was sufficiently developed by the time she was assaulted that she had internalised the loss of symbolic capital staying out overnight would incur and the resulting withdrawal of essential social and economic capital from her parents. At the same time, she ‘knew’ that her best option was to marry the man who raped her, thereby gaining the cultural, symbolic, social and economic capital associated with marriage, motherhood and submissive femininity rather than facing the consequences associated with the pariah status of lost chastity and undisciplined femininity. Thus, as Chambers describes, options that might have challenged the patriarchal habitus and enabled her to manoeuvre otherwise were erased from her imagination – or at least rendered illegitimate or impractical – before the circumstances arose in which she would need to choose.

Chambers additionally asserts that gender is reproduced, although variably, across fields and that, even if habitus may change upon field crossing, it is unlikely that the gender norms therein will do so (Chambers 2005). This proved true for Edith. During the early period of her marriage and while bride price negotiations were on-going, Edith adjusted to lost social and cultural capital as the marital home became her primary field, and she focused on learning her new roles and rights as a young wife. In her case, the strategy of submission to patriarchal norms and mobilisation of feminine capital – the ‘gender advantage’ derived from a ‘disposition or skill set’ socially associated with femininity (Huppatz 2009, 50) – was highly effective in maximising her benefit and wellbeing (within the given limitations). Crucially, her husband largely fulfilled the ideal masculinity, providing economically, caring for her health, honouring her in public, seeking formal marriage, transgressing strict gender roles to help her with household tasks and largely avoiding further violence.

Furthermore, having a child, thereby fulfilling a primary obligation of hegemonic femininity, gained her access to cultural, social and symbolic female capital – derived from having a female body (Huppatz 2009, 50) and economic security:

People in this home are happy about my pregnancy, and my life here is good … [My baby being born] was important because … at least I can be a mature person people respect in society. (Edith, age 19)

Acquiescing to patriarchal expectations early in marriage slowly earned her capital associated with hegemonic femininity and the position of mother, which she then used to advocate for herself (for example, joining a Village Savings and Loans group and preventing her husband from drinking alcohol). Thus, the promises and strategies of patriarchy established in her adolescent habitus served her well as she moved into young adult social fields, and she did not note imagining alternatives or lamenting an inability to do so.

Josephine: seeking regulated liberties in a context of limited capital

Not all study participants encountered a smooth alignment between habitus and field or were able to access enough capital to meet their needs as they traversed adolescence. For many, patriarchal excess – domination of women by men achieved not merely through consent but through various forms of gendered violence experienced as unacceptable – marked the transition into early adulthood. Similarly, to Edith, 19-year-old Josephine sought refuge within patriarchal norms in order to avoid pariah femininity and further capital losses. When her father discovered that she was dating, he severely beat her and stopped paying her school fees, forcing her to go to relatives for help. They provided medical assistance, and then she married her husband to avoid returning home. However, unlike Edith, her attempts to fulfil hegemonic femininity did not reward her with status or security.

Her position as wife – a capital-bearing object for her husband and in-laws – is perhaps the defining feature of her early adulthood. Her husband demanded a highly restrictive and public enactment of feminine submission across fields, forbidding her to work: ‘He says when a woman earns, she becomes big-headed; she does not listen’; restricting her social network and movement in public space: ‘I don’t even go anywhere because my husband refused me to move around that I will get spoilt by other women by gossiping’; and forbidding her from using family planning: ‘He said that if I start using family planning, I would become promiscuous because then I will not get pregnant’. When she challenged his alcohol use, extramarital affairs and financial neglect, Josephine’s husband became violent, accusing her of ‘embarrassing’ him. These examples illustrate the high stakes game of gender hegemony – how Josephine’s feminine capital accrued to her husband as masculine capital, and his attainment of hegemonic masculinity depended on her performance of hegemonic femininity.

Josephine’s discontent and determination to challenge her husband’s authority grew over time. For example, at age 20 she stated: ‘… for me, I will not allow myself to be producing like a rat. I am already planning to go with some friend of mine to Lira town to a family planning clinic and join without his knowledge’. However, she was quite aware of the risks associated with subverting expected gender roles and her limited power to realistically do so, saying that the man makes the final decisions about how many children to have ‘[b]ecause you are fearing to be thrown out of the marriage, be beaten if you don’t let him decide; you have to agree because he is the head of that home, and he has the authority’. Because no bride price or other process to formalise the marriage occurred, she primarily inhabited the pariah position of illegitimate wife and mother across fields and consequently lacked the capital required to radically change her circumstances. Thus, despite encouragement from her parents to leave her husband, she stayed, explaining: ‘It is very shameful to leave your matrimonial home. And … I did not know where else to go with all the problems associated with pregnancy’. Instead, she pursued a range of regulated liberties that relieved the most severe symptoms of patriarchal excess, investing in her own social capital, spending extended periods of time at her mother’s home and seeking ways to earn money to provide for her basic needs.

It was not until her husband’s gender capital was severely threatened that space opened up for her to successfully influence their relationship. First, after facing chastisement from neighbours, her in-laws intervened in his alcoholism. Shortly thereafter, he became sick, and this combined loss of power opened space for her to advocate for use of a family planning method. Due to the intricate tie between her femininity and her husband’s masculinity, she was able to threaten him with loss of his own symbolic capital were she to again become pregnant and incur the pariah femininity associated with unregulated sexuality. Thus, it was by manipulating her position as a capital-bearing object that she was able to enact the greatest change. Josephine’s story illustrates the serious limitations to feminine capital within a hegemonic gender habitus. The negative consequences of patriarchal excess experienced across fields helped Josephine to develop critical consciousness of the absurdity of many prevailing gender norms and effectively ‘triggered dispositions to resist’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, cited in Lovell 2000, 34). While she found some support for those dispositions with friends and family, she lacked the social and economic capital on which to practically resist, and the symbolic economy made such dispositions largely politically inefficient beyond performance of regulated liberties.

Charity: mobilising capital to resist across varied fields

Most participants’ experiences fell somewhere between Edith’s and Josephine’s, and 17-year-old Charity’s story illustrates the interplay between resistance to and reproduction of patriarchy over time. Charity’s habitus and capital holdings of childhood and early adolescence facilitated notable agency and some gender flexibility, which she mobilised to the best of her ability as she embodied, claimed and rejected various feminine subject positions over time.

When we first met her, Charity presented herself as an ambitious and secure young woman. She recounted having strong and diverse social capital: a highly involved extended family, caring church network and supportive friends. She also had notable cultural capital: she was head girl in her senior three class and participated in her school’s Young Christian Society. Like many girls in the study, she positioned herself as a capital-bearing subject with her own interests and strategies. She was determined to delay marriage until securing her future with education; she was able to jokingly threaten her father not to drink alcohol (or else she would beat him!); and she rejected her teacher’s sexual advances and reported him to the police for attempting to assault her. Throughout these processes, she wielded her social capital to her benefit and received notable feminine and symbolic capital as chaste, obedient, hardworking and clever. However, her position within most fields as daughter – a capital-bearing object for others – provided her with limited capital that she might mobilise to act against the will of her kin, and the position of student held little manoeuvrable capital outside the field of school.

These limitations became evident when she was raped and became pregnant. Like Edith and Josephine, her initial strategy was to submit to patriarchy in order to then make legitimate claims to the capital and protections it promised. After being raped she told the man: ‘[Y]ou either go to my dad, or I remain here as your wife’. When he refused to legitimise her status, saying, ‘Do you think if I go to your father you will gain back your virginity?’, she then strategised to resist instead. She went to her aunt for help, who told her not to tell anyone, especially not her father because ‘my father would accuse her and blame her’. When she discovered she was pregnant, she was forced to tell her father, who also responded by seeking to reclaim her cultural and symbolic capital, instructing her to tell her ‘husband’ to come and introduce himself. However, he refused to pay bride price or visit her father. Thus, despite her efforts to fight for her dignity and wellbeing, both within and by challenging the constraints of the patriarchal habitus, she was unable to protect her social and symbolic capital, and her social position changed from proud daughter to scorned daughter and illegitimate wife and mother. Once again, she strategised to maximise her benefits within the patriarchal habitus. She stayed with her husband and focused for a time on adjusting to the position of wife. However, she lamented the social and cultural capital losses incurred in this process, saying: ‘I felt my life was different, because all my friend[s] were at school and, for me, I was already a dropout, yet I loved studies … every day was just full of household work’. Thus, the habitus she had developed at home and school during earlier adolescence was incompatible with the limitations placed on her in marriage, enabling her to build critical consciousness of the patriarchal expectations of that field.

Many girls in this study, including Charity, experienced a general loss of social capital upon marriage, followed by deepened social capital with their biological mothers as marital relations became conflictual. When her husband neglected her and then her brothers-in-law attempted to sexually assault her, she determined that the benefits of submitting to hegemonic gender relations no longer outweighed the costs and moved to her estranged mother’s home. There, she learned that having a child had changed her female capital such that the position of mother was now central across fields. Charity rejected the limitations that this promised to impose on her life trajectory, and was working and saving money in order to return to school; however, her mother reinforced the gendered habitus, encouraging her to ‘…forget everything and move on with life; she tells me to take care of my child'. Thus, as many other girls, Charity learned the importance of a strategy of perseverance, reflecting: ‘What happened to me is too big for another person to experience, so meaning God meant that to happen to me because he saw that I can persevere [more] than any other person!’

Discussion

Hegemonic femininity and masculinity provide the ‘networks of meaning’ that ‘legitimate and ensure’ a gender habitus of unequal power relations and distributions of resources (Schippers 2007, 100–101). In northern Uganda, hegemonic femininity is rooted in women’s roles and characteristics during the reproductive stage of the life-course. Thus, the gender norms that they learn to embody, even during childhood and early adolescence, are oriented towards the successful attainment of adult reproductive femininity. Consequently, as girls enter and move through puberty and begin to meet the physical criteria for hegemonic femininity, the types of capital and processes by which capital may be accessible to them become increasingly gendered as well. Girls’ long-term wellbeing crucially depends on interventions that facilitate careful adoption of and manoeuvring around such gendered processes as they transition through adolescence, with important implications for contesting the existential and material bases of gender inequality.

Openings for the transformation of the gender habitus and transgression of patriarchal norms in order to secure better opportunities are specific to each life-course stage. During and before puberty, patterns already exist in the types of capital boys and girls might access and in how and in which fields they might exchange capital accrued or control its deployment. Young girls’ intersectional social position as very young adolescent and as daughter, student or sister provides them with restricted opportunities for capital accumulation or control across most fields. At the same time, it exposes them to limited dangers of capital losses for gender role transgressions (and assignment of pariah femininity) when compared with boys of the same age cohort and with older girls, as long as core aspects of hegemonic femininity (respect and hard work) are upheld. Consequently, considering intersectionality is important not only in health disparities research but also in health behaviour programming.

For instance, while life-course transitions and their impact on girls’ capital are fluid and sometimes ambiguous, the transition from puberty to sexual maturity and adult roles initiates changes in the social fields that most girls inhabit and in their positions within those fields. Two major shifts occur in older adolescence. First, symbolic capital plays a heightened role regulating girls’ power within social, cultural and material economies. Second, girls encounter magnified pressure to act as bearers of capital for others, such as husbands, fathers, brothers and in-laws, rather than as subjects who may accumulate and wield capital of their own accord. These changes expose girls to increased costs for deviating from hegemonic femininity – particularly sexual, economic and social gender-based violence – and offer powerful motivations for girls to both reproduce and challenge such norms, depending on the field, situation and the capital costs or rewards therein.

Despite largely coherent foundations of a patriarchal habitus across participants, girls in our study did not uniformly embody – or seek to embody – hegemonic femininity as they grew into young adults.

Our findings offer insight into several common strategies that girls used to gain greater space and power. First, regulated liberties proved critical to girls’ long-term perseverance and gradual cultivation of their own capital and identity over time. While not sufficient in themselves, they may be a valuable intermediary step in moving towards egalitarian norms. Interventions that seek to support long-term wellbeing beyond immediate economic gains can focus on factors that allow regulated liberties (such as going to natal homes in times of violence) to turn into sustained transformations at later points in the life-course (through access to built capital and networks less controlled by gender hegemony).

Second, consciousness-building was important for many and occurred as a result of field crossing and intra-field dissonances. Specifically, experiences of excessive violence or domination that exceed the bounds set by hegemonic masculinity and are therefore socially illegitimate often helped to awaken critical consciousness. However, the interdependence of reflexivity and capital cannot be understated, as discontent with the prevailing system does not simply translate into the capacity for effective action, as Cleeve et al.’s (2017) findings among girls considering abortion in Uganda illustrate. Therefore, interventions might create substantial access to different types of capital for those who experience patriarchal excess and subsequently awakened critical consciousness.

Third, gender manifests differently in each field, but the requirements of hegemonic masculinity and femininity shape the rules across fields. These insights confirm the continuing relevance of resistance strategies that Bourdieu and subsequent theorists have proposed. At the same time, they demonstrate how an in-depth, longitudinal and gender-attuned view of a social order may reveal greater nuance internal to each strategy and suggest promise in targeting life-course transitions as moments to generate and diffuse new norms and values. Future work in this area would, therefore, benefit from longitudinal studies examining how these regulated liberties accrue capital over time, such as Cislaghi et al.’s (2019) analysis of how household gender norms changed through girls’ participation in sport-based intervention Parivartan.

The three stories presented here lend evidence to the need for imaginative and structural interventions that expand the habitus that girls live in (and thus their capacity to imagine options) early on. These interventions should span economic, resilience, reflective, symbolic and modelling dimensions/components at all socio-ecological levels. First, programmes can take on resilience and appreciative focused approaches when working with girls to foster critical thinking in schools and consciousness-raising reflection and dialogue within communities in order to establish alternative gender norms. Second, interventions might maximise effectiveness by pairing symbolic, social and economic strategies at life-stages that alter later pathways and/or influence younger girls’ aspirations, such as puberty, sexual initiation, early marriage and parenting. Third, since socialisation critically happens through interpersonal relationships, particularly with parents and peers, programmes may work by strengthening social networks (Viner et al. 2012) and leveraging positive role models – for example, promoting new images such as those of Beyoncé, Malala Yousafzai and Fearless Girl that provide imaginative outlets that expand girls’ aspirational capacity and habitus early on. Finally, micro- and macro-economic interventions may provide opportunities to access and control capital but would be more potent when broader efforts empower not only young women but also older women, other extended family members and communities as well.

Conclusion

In acknowledging the overarching power of the prevailing gender order, we must look to opportunities to foster normative change at the roots of the patriarchal order that is being reproduced in the habitus of young women, while supporting their ability to both resist and build new paradigms for their wellbeing. This requires a broad-based assessment of the multiple factors that support existing hegemonic masculinities and interlocking priorities – including knowledge, skills, resources, policy, social and religious norms – and tackling these factors in a concerted, inter-disciplinary fashion.

Acknowledgements

We thank the young people in this study for sharing their personal experiences navigating adolescence; members of USAID/Washington and Uganda for their commitment to implementation science research related to adolescent health; the staff of Applied Research Bureau Ltd for excellence in collecting and transmitting these stories; the team of Institute for Reproductive Health staff, consultants and interns for their diligent support of the analysis process; and partner staff from the Concerned Parents Association, the Straight Talk Foundation, Save the Children and Pathfinder International for their diligence and hard work during the recruitment process for each round of interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under the terms of the Cooperative Agreement No. AID–OAA–10–00073. The contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of USAID or Georgetown University.

Notes

1 For findings from all participants, including those pertaining to boys and masculinity, see Chantelois et al. 2016 and Lundgren et al. 2019.