Popobawa by Katrina Daly Thompson

Author:Katrina Daly Thompson [Thompson, Katrina Daly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253024565
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

6 Women as Sexual and Discursive Agents

“If we understand women’s everyday talk and linguistic genres as forms of resistance, we hear, in any culture, not so much a clear and heretofore neglected ‘woman’s voice,’ or separate culture, but rather linguistic practices that are more ambiguous, often contradictory, differing among women of different classes and ethnic groups and ranging from accommodation to opposition, subversion, rejection, or autonomous reconstruction of reigning cultural definitions.”

—Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence”

IF TALK ABOUT Popobawa allows Swahili-speakers to transgress speech restrictions without censure, women are among those with the most to benefit from such transgressions. From a critical perspective, women’s conversation offers a productive site for the study of gender politics—especially relations of power and ideology that deny women’s discursive agency. The conflation of ideologies about women’s speech in Swahili society and Muslim women’s sexuality also denies their sexual agency, prohibiting them from talking about their sexual experiences and desires. Three social factors shape coastal women’s talk about sex and the supernatural: (1) a discursive culture that emphasizes equivocal nonverbal 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 discursive ones during talk about spirit possession and other occult phenomena. Conversations about supernatural sex become particularly useful for women because supernatural phenomena themselves violate gender ideals and Islamic sexual ethics, revealing their constructed nature; by talking about the transgression of sexual prohibitions, women are able to violate both normative constructions of sexuality and to assert their agency. If the practice of increasingly conservative forms of Islam has had a silencing effect on queer men’s voices hard to hear, it has also made women’s discursive agency difficult—and yet crucial—to locate in Swahili society. Talk about supernatural sex is one site where coastal Muslim women, like queer men, discuss sexual desire and construct themselves as agents.

This chapter, like the previous one, builds on research in the field of language and sexuality, the study of “how desire is actually conveyed through language in social life.”1 Linguists Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick suggest that the ethnographic study of language socialization is one strand of social science research in which desire and prohibitions become observable.2 Below, I show how Zanzibari Muslim women are socialized into not talking about their sexual desires. Nevertheless, my analysis shows that talk about supernatural sex offers a framework in which they can disrupt dominant ideologies of desire and silence into which they are socialized. As anthropologist Kjersti Larsen has shown, “Zanzibari women speak with many voices, being at once both controllers and controlled, performers and audience. Moreover, in many situations they may convey contradictory messages.”3 Once again, I demonstrate that by paying attention to “sideward glances,” we can better understand how women orient to multiple discourses simultaneously; their negotiation of the contradictory messages at hand allows not only more open talk about sexuality and desire than might otherwise have been possible, but being aware of this negotiation also allows understandings of language and sexuality that would otherwise be muted.

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