Demanding sexual satisfaction: women’s agentic practices and male sexual “non-performance” in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

This paper explores women’s agentic practices in expressing their sexual dissatisfaction in the context of male sexual ‘non-performance’. Much scholarly work on male sexual ‘non-performance’ in Tanzanian context largely focus on the voices of men in making sense of their sexual performance concerns. Common limitations of these studies are isolating women from male sexual ‘non-performance’ and their narrow focus on the voices of women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, and building on the Afro-feminism perspective, this article demonstrates women’s cheating habits, breaking up with their partners, naming and shaming and, participating in non-sexual intimate matters as agentic practices of their sexual dissatisfaction in heterosexual relationships. While these practices that women devise to handle their male partner’s sexual ‘non-performance’ challenge the patriarchal structures of sexuality and gender relations on the one hand, they performatively reproduce them on the other hand. The findings of this paper indicate that women are active social actors, who are often sexually expressive and devise various agentic practices for handling their partners’ sexual ‘non-performance’. In a nutshell, women’s viewpoints in this paper highlight the need to further consider how women demand and achieve sexual satisfaction in their sexual relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• sexual satisfaction
• Afro-feminism
• male sexual ‘non-performance’
• Tanzania

Acknowledgments

This paper has been written during my fellowship at the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Center of excellence in Notions of Identities in Africa based at Makerere University, Uganda. I am grateful to the the African Humanities Program (AHP) and ARUA/Carnegie Early Career Research Fellowship Programme for their support during this fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Notes on contributors

Simon Mutebi

Simon Mutebi is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. His research interests include: Gender, Masculinity, Sexuality and Reproductive Health.