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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my lived realities as an unmarried Shona woman and intervening in the nascent field of singles studies, I explore circumstances around women’s singlehood and the associated burden of care. This offers critical insights into the broader gendered, cultural and economic dynamics of care work

Paper long abstract:

Existing scholarship on women and care work in Africa has often focused on married women in heterosexual couplings. In this paper, I make an intervention in the field of critical singles studies. Although recognizing the multifaceted informal care work done by married women in heteropatriarchal African contexts, I complicate and nuance this idea by drawing attention to and analyzing my lived realities as an unmarried Shona woman. I foreground my voice and lived experiences as a Shona woman who is not married and think through the specific kinds of informal care work demanded, explicitly and implicitly, of single unmarried women. Of particular interest, I want to think through how my identity and lived realities, as an exemplar of a single unmarried woman, show that multifaceted care work (affective, financial) is often demanded of unmarried women because they do not have families of their own. I examine how being a single, unmarried, and ‘childless’ woman implies that a woman such as myself is by default at the entire disposal of the extended family, which continues to play a pivotal role in Shona communities in Zimbabwe. Exploring circumstances around women’s singlehood and the associated burden of ‘care’, in the broad sense, offers critical insights into the changes in their professional, relational, romantic, and sexual lives, and thus also in the broader gendered, cultural, social and economic dynamics in which these shifts are embedded.