A Fraught Embrace by Swidler Ann; Watkins Susan Cotts;

Author:Swidler, Ann; Watkins, Susan Cotts; [Swidler, Ann; Watkins, Susan Cotts;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691173924
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 8.1. Village women socializing. Malawians spend a great deal of time gossiping about the moral and immoral behavior of their neighbors. Here, a group of women are laughing and chatting on the veranda of the home of one of them. Photo: Gerald Cotts.

Another dramatic incident in a market center drew a crowd of onlookers who laughed and jeered. The ethnographer describes a wife storming into a bar looking for the bar girl who has been sleeping with her husband. The bar girl and the husband have run away, but the other bar girls attack the wife and defend their right to do business on their own premises. The wife, her lip bloodied, insults them, calling them “prostitutes” and boasting that she gets the husband’s “whole salary” while they receive only a paltry sum. The bar girls taunt the wife for not being able to satisfy her husband, with one shouting, “You have the big problem, big mum, your husband is not for you alone! He was born not for you special, and indeed he will be sleeping with all of us here, because we also need what he has, we need the penis as well, for once it enters on us, we just know that we are to eat that day. No penis, no money!”15

Against this background, it is perhaps understandable that Malawians’ image of vulnerable women differs from that of international donors.

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