Paper short abstract:

In post-independence Kenya popular media played a significant role in creating imaginaries of class, family and nation. The paper discusses ads directed at middle class urban women, invoking ideals of health, cleanliness, beauty and eroticism.

Paper long abstract:

In the post-independence period of accelerated social transformation in Kenya, popular media played a significant role in constructing imaginaries of class, family and nation. Magazines like Joe, True Love and Family represent a strong, normative drive towards new forms of social organization, built on gender equality and entitlesment to citizenship, welfare and consumption. The ads used the language and iconography of affect to awaken in the implied reader, mainly women, sensations of intimacy, care, love, eroticism and beauty. In their drive to turn desires held by women into consumption, the ads constructed coherent social imaginaries of gender relations, promoting nuclear families, health, hygiene and fashion. Ads directed at individual and household consumption were predominant and provided the attractive aesthetics of a glossy and colourful world; however other ads, less prominent, reflected the larger enabling and constraining world of economic realities: banking, insurance, loans and hire purchase. The paper illuminates the gendered discourses and iconography of advertisements. It discusses the role of the 'modern African woman' as the advertisements' implied reader, and the role of the ads for the social imaginaries of women in Kenya. Was consumption as represented in popular magazines, a significant identity marker for aspirational middle class women in Kenya in the period?