Abstract

Abstract:

In 2014, Uganda panicked over miniskirts. That February, President Yoweri Museveni enacted the Anti-Homosexuality and Anti-Pornography Bills, dubbed by the media as the "anti-gay" and "miniskirt" bills respectively. As the legislation was publicly debated, homophobia and misogyny surged. Scholarly and popular critics alike have claimed that panics surrounding the legislation had simply displaced citizens' ongoing political and economic anxieties onto sexual minorities and young women, suggesting that politicians "talk about sex" as a convenient distraction. This article takes another perspective. By examining the multiple political, socioeconomic, and intimate phenomena that gave rise to Uganda's contemporary crises over sexuality, I argue that sex panics not only displace and distract but also condense a variety of concerns over the changing terms of social reproduction into a singular, sexualized object—in the Ugandan case, the miniskirt. By the time Uganda's sex panics erupted, the miniskirt had come to symbolize women's increasing power in domains both public and private. First, in a context where young men's ability to earn stable incomes has waned, miniskirts represented progressive affirmative action measures that have been pivotal to helping women graduate from university, take public office, and access economic opportunity. Second, miniskirts panicked Ugandans as symbols of an especially emasculating practice emerging in Kampala's sexual economy called detoothing. To detooth is to trick a man out of his end of a transactional sexual deal—to make him a social and economic eunuch. Both detoothing and women's rights, while so opposite in ostensible purpose and practice, provoked parallel anxieties over the purported threat that women's growing socioeconomic independence posed to so-called "African" tradition, especially that marriage payments guarantee women's bodies and labor to men. Further politicized as symbols of the breakdown of the national family, I argue that what the miniskirt ultimately revealed was the patriarchal postcolonial state's waning sovereignty over its national social reproduction.

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