Presence, Agency and Popularity: Kenyan “Socialites”, Femininities and Digital Media

Abstract

Representations and self-representations in new digital cultures have complicated readings of gender and sexuality in the media in increasingly interesting ways. This article explores such representations, focusing on two well-known figures in the Kenyan tabloid media, Vera Sidika and Huddah Monroe. These two women are informally referred to as “socialites”, a reference made to their adopted over-the-top lifestyles and choices of self-representation in social media. Reading these platforms as key to popular culture, I introduce the argument for agency, which I argue seeks to complicate the easy reading of these women as representative of neoliberal postfeminist cultures. It also complicates a reading of them as hypersexual women working within an attention economy. I argue that within a highly patriarchal society such as Kenya, agency could be read through the visual representations of women who transgress hegemonic patriarchal logic and offer a nuanced reading of gender and sexuality discourses.

Keywords:

• popular culture
• self-representation
• patriarchy
• gender
• sexuality
• tabloids