Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from two different urban settings in Africa, we argue how the making and breaking of religiously-informed sexual norms are inextricably linked in processes of self-fashioning among young women in urban Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from two different urban settings in Africa, we argue how the making and breaking of (religious) norms are inextricably linked in processes of self-fashioning among young women in urban Africa. Self-fashioning implies ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988) in which a dual process of making-cum-breaking vis-à-vis (sexual) norms include a (re-) fashioning of such norms. The first case is a wedding between two young Senegalese women in Dakar in 2020. Organising such an event in a country where same-sex relations are criminalised represents a rather bold breaking of the rules. On closer inspection, however, the event reveals a re-appropriation of the grand scheme of heteronormative marriage. By creating new rules and roles within a queer community, these women refashioned its meaning, thereby re-imagining dominant ideas about identity, citizenship and social mobility. The second case concerns an appearance of a young woman on a public YouTube channel of a Pentecostal pastor in Botswana, who was interviewed about the sexual violence she once experienced. Emulating a counseling-session, both the Pentecostal leader and the young woman deliberately broke with local cultural norms of silence and discretion about such matters. As also the mother of the woman was invited to the interview, it reveals how, contrary to the extended family, the Pentecostal norm of opening up about intimate matters privileges the nuclear family for doing so. Both cases demonstrate processes of cultural change that revolve around the productive interrelationship between the making and breaking of norms in diverse religious contexts.