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Abstract
This article explores the figure of the good time girl as generated through discussions of young women's sexualities in popular media platforms in Kenya. The article locates itself within a socio-historical space in which sexuality has always been debated through a dominant moral economy embedded within religious and traditional structures. It seeks to answer questions around how, within such a context, the figure of the good time girl can be understood in contemporary Kenya. In this regard, the article considers competing meanings of the good time girl within and beyond the inscriptions of heteropatriarchal ideals that attempt to normalize and fix the sexual identities of young women in Kenya. The article uses the broad template of the good time girl, as articulated in African popular culture, to try and understand the differing ways in which the sexualities of young women, particularly those attending university, are publicly debated and represented in the Kenyan media. The work is framed around scholarship on sexuality and gender in Africa. Methodologically, the work draws on theories of popular culture that emphasize how new genres constituted through new forms of addressivity constitute new publics, enabling possibilities for accessing meaning in new ways.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the African Humanities Fellowship Programme for making it possible for me to carry out research for this article. I would like to acknowledge the support of the African Humanities Programme Fellowship for the 2012–1013 competition year which enabled me to complete this article, as part of a larger project on Kenyan popular culture.
Notes
1 The Nairobian is owned by the Standard Group, which runs the more ‘serious’ newspaper, The Standard.
2 ‘Crazy Mondays’, The Standard newspaper.
3 This image is not new. When I presented this article at a conference recently, I was reminded that, in fact, the hostels were named thus because male students often felt they had no resources to compete with the rich working men that the female students preferred. The hostels became ‘pick up points’ but also represented the inaccessible women who were attracted to the materialist gains made possible precisely because they were at the university.
4 This number varies according to the period of its narration. In more recent accounts, the young woman infects 322 men and has plans to infect another 2000 before her death. That the story is recycled is apparent in the way the chronology of the story is improbable or inaccurate. The core of the narrative is always the same, and the girl in the story is always from one of major universities in Kenya.
6 Ibid.
14 I have edited and translated some of the comments for purposes of clarity. The comments can be accessed in their original form through the following link https://www.facebook.com/DailyNation/posts/273057186139456
16 Ibid.