This thesis concerns class-privileged young women in Lagos, Nigeria, who dress m a 'hyper-feminine style' characterized by the spectacular use and combination of elements such as cascading hair extensions, long acrylic nails, heavy make-up, false eyelashes and towering heels. Understanding gender as discursively and performatively constituted, and the practice of 'dressing up' as one of its technologies, the thesis explores what kinds of gendered subjectivities such women are constituting in and through their particular style. It is based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 18 women aged between 18 and 35, and takes a discursive analytic approach to explore the subject positions that the women variously negotiate as they talk about their style and its requisite practices, considerations and meanings. Repertoires of individualized choice, pleasure, entitlement and empowerment run through the women's talk, while contrary notions and also experiences of their dress practice as normative, disciplined, laborious, physically risky and painful are downplayed and deflected. The research participants position themselves as knowing and skilled consumers of fashion and beauty, and proffer this as both an empowered and empowering feminine rationality. Asserting simultaneously black, Nigerian and cosmopolitan positionalities, they reject any suggestion of performing a racially or culturally inauthentic style of femininity. They name their fashion as 'girly' and themselves as 'girly-girls' but emphasize that these discursive positions signify neither feminine frivolity nor traditional domesticity but stylized freedom. Abstract: As such the thesis argues that the women see themselves as postfeminist subjects: already individually empowered, beyond gendered politics and power. The thesis supports this empirical contention by re-theorizing postfeminism as a classed and commodified transnational cultural sensibility. In its concern with the performative intersections of gender, race, class, consumption, locality and transnationality in the fashioning of contemporary African femininities, the thesis makes unique and critical contributions to feminist and African cultural studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:680161 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Dosekun, Simidele Olatokunbo |
| Publisher | King's College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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