ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of three main analytical zones that frame the theoretical basis for this research. I am interested in scholarship that theorises sexuality as a site of contestation for power and political interests. This material is useful for laying the foundation for discourses on sexuality. Three main areas of review emerge here. The first concerns the absence of gender as a variable in understanding the contestations around the ‘new African state’. I draw here on the reflections of African feminists who problematise the notion of a fixed, unifying African cultural dynamic that was destroyed by the imperial enterprise through the reification of the ‘tribe’. The second area seeks to understand the terms on which women were drawn into the post-colonial African nation/state project. By examining both development and empowerment paradigms I unpack the modernity/tradition binary that has been used to shape and influence the development of the ‘modern’ nation state, while maintaining the policing and regulation of women’s bodies as central to the machinery of nation building.
