“Modest Desires and Defiant Gestures”: Representing Female Sexualities in Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe and Violet Barungi’s Cassandra

Abstract

This article examines how Doreen Baingana in Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe (2005) and Violet Barungi in Cassandra (1999) engage with aspects of female sexuality such as eroticism, desire, and sexual agency. I explore how these writers set these modes of being in intersectional relation with various patriarchal institutions. I focus on the different degrees of co-option and coercion, containment and escape associated with representations of female bodies and sexualities. In particular, I investigate how the authors’ portrayal of female sexual agency contest at the same time as they reproduce received, normative “truths” about female sexualities.

Keywords:

• sexuality
• sexual agency
• respectability
• representation

Notes on Contributor

Asante Lucy Mtenje is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research interests lie in sexuality and gender studies, Afro-diasporic studies, popular culture, and Malawian oral literature. She is also a published poet and short-story writer.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.