Empowered Women and Vulnerable Men: Gender and Agency in Stories of Sexual Infidelity in Malawi

• In Event: 379 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Paper Session. Global Masculinities – Domination and Dispossession

Abstract

Narratives of “AIDS in Africa” have been, for the past decade, infused with concern about the epidemiological and social vulnerability of married women, who get infected by unfaithful husbands despite playing by the rules of monogamy. Men’s sexual agency, in their ability to seek additional partners and to spell the terms of sexual encounters, is portrayed as being at the heart of women’s vulnerability.
In young Malawians’ accounts of male infidelity, however, women’s agency takes center stage in stories of both male and female infidelity. Stories of male infidelity focus on “the other women’s” actions to secure sexual and intimate relationships with coupled men; they are about the action of one woman on another, mediated through a passive man. In contrast, stories of female infidelity feature dissatisfied women who seek additional partners when their relationship does not give them the sex, money or commitment that they want.
Where aid agencies see too little empowerment in partnered women, Malawian respondents see too much agency from unpartnered women. In both cases, the emphasis on individual sexual practices through categories such as risk or morality takes away from an understanding of the powerful institutions that shape such practices, and of the particular patriarchal bargains women must navigate as they strive for a good life.

Author

• Anais Bertrand-Dansereau, Centre for Population Dynamics