Material girls and Material love: Consuming femininity and the contradictions of post-girl power among Kenyan schoolgirls

Abstract

In this paper, I use qualitative data to explore the practices engaged in by Kenyan schoolgirls to participate in modern consuming womanhood, as well as the contradictory implications of these practices for thinking about globalized mediated femininities and their enactment in resource-poor settings. The paper examines the centrality of consumption to valued modern femininity among young women around the world, as well as the structural reality of gendered access to income. I show how the co-optation of the materiality of romantic love and normative expectations of male provision in romantic relationships bridge the gap between consumption desires and economic realities among Kenyan schoolgirls in both powerful and problematic ways. The paper ends with a reflection on the implications of these findings for post-girl power, the post-feminist age and the re-inscription of patriarchy.

Acknowledgements

I thank all the respondents who participated in this study. The conclusions and opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the agency. The article has greatly benefited from comments from the special issue anonymous reviewers and editors Anita Harris and Amy Dobson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Methodological note: The quote is excerpted from Mojola (2014a) where a fuller description of the study protocol, data, setting, methods and ethical approval can be found. The study protocol was approved by the University of Chicago's social sciences institutional review board, the Ministry of Education, Republic of Kenya, and the Nyanza district and school officials overseeing the sites of study. All names of respondents are pseudonyms to preserve privacy and anonymity. The study included individual, focus group and key informant interviews as well as ethnographic observations. Grounded theory was used in data collection and analysis. Key resources used in conducting interviews, writing field notes, coding and analysing data include Weiss (1994), Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995) and Charmaz (2001).

Additional information

Funding

This work has benefited from research, administrative and computing support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development–funded University of Colorado Population Center [grant number R24HD066613].

Notes on contributors

Sanyu A. Mojola

Sanyu Mojola is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder where she teaches courses on gender, health and romantic relationships. Her recent book, Love, Money and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS (University of California Press, 2014) examines how transactional relationships, consumption and entanglements of love and money are implicated in young African women's disproportionate vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Her work has also been published in Signs, Social Science and Medicine, and Studies in Family Planning.