"Modest Desires and Defiant Gestures": Representing Female Sexualities in Doreen Baingana's Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe and Violet Barungi's Cassandra. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mtenje, Asante Lucy
• Is Part Of: Current writing. Volume 29:Issue 1(2017)
• Page Start: 26
• Page End: 36
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: sexuality -- sexual agency -- respectability -- representation; Southern African literature (English) -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Electronic journals; 820.996805
• DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2017.1287383
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1013-929X

Abstract

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.