Affiliation:
1. University of California at Los Angeles, USA,
Abstract
This article analyzes a conversation with two Zanzibari women about sex between humans and spirits. This research demonstrates how they navigate gender-based restrictions on discourse to discuss sex and desire, violating a hegemonic language ideology that would silence them. Whereas previous work has focused on how Swahili women subvert gendered speech prohibitions by nonverbally taking up discourse produced by others, this article examines how they produce resistant discourse themselves. The analysis is contextualized in terms of three social elements that shape women’s talk about (supernatural) sex: (1) a discursive culture that emphasizes equivocal interpersonal communication; (2) a language ideology informed by an Islamic emphasis on discretion; and (3) the extension of cultural transgressions allowed during spirit possession to transgressions during talk about spirit possession and other occult phenomena.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Sociology and Political Science,Language and Linguistics,Communication
Reference63 articles.
1. "Ordinary Household Chores": Ritual and Power in a 19th-Century Swahili Women's Spirit Possession Cult
2. Amory, P. ( 1998) ‘Mashoga, Mabasha, and Magai: "Homosexuality" on the East African Coast’, in S.O. Murray and W. Roscoe (eds) Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, pp. 41-62. New York: St Martin’s Press.
3. Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast
Cited by
19 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献