Of Female Husbands and Boarding School Girls

Gender Bending in Unoma Azuah's Fiction

Bibliographic Data

ID9249882
AuthorsC Zabus (0000-0003-4468-3731, Laboratoire de Recherche Vasculaire Translationnelle, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume39
Issue2
Pages93-107
Publication date2008-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ral.2008.39.2.93
OpenAlexW2076593429
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited23

While Azuah's novel Sky-High Flames () is firmly grounded in the Igbo sociological context, comprising ancestor worship, the cult of a female goddess, polygamy, and the levirate, the novel taps into the practice of female husbandry documented by cultural anthropologists (e.g., Sylvia Leith-Ross and Ifi Amadiume, whose theories I reassess), previous West African literary attempts at representing lesbian seduction, as well relational nexuses within the boarding school system. Nigerian feminisms, I argue, need to make room for the material factors of "doing lesbian." While pointing to this debut novel's reluctance to allow same-sex desire to develop, I also comment on womanly relationality, such as Azuah's displaced (auto)biographical vestment in her aunt's story, as well as on moments of intimacy between women, which augur the new Nigerian novel's capacity to comment on the economy of pleasures and on the way of constituting oneself as the moral subject of one's sexual conduct

Boarding school · Sociology · Theology · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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