Gender and Sexuality: Gradations, Contestations

This chapter considers the variability of gender and sexuality in Africa while analyzing different lenses used in their study, differentiated by their contexts and goals. Most early scholarly writings on African social structure were produced by colonial anthropologists from the 1920s to the 1950s. This knowledge began to be contested in the early 1970s by Second Wave feminist scholars, who attacked the androcentricity of most anthropological texts and shifted focus to women.¹ From the 1980 s onward an increasing wave of postcolonial scholarship has questioned colonial as well as feminist assumptions regarding gender and sexuality in Africa.