ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines the gendered discourses conveyed during discussions on widow inheritance, rather than what widow inheritance is or what its merits and demerits may be. It illustrates that how normative gendered order is consistently disrupted. The chapter discusses how sites that are constructed as ‘private’, ‘localised’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘feminised’ produce robust discourses around communal re-configuration, re-assertion of identity and definition of both internal and external boundaries. The need to control ‘wayward femininities’ and sexualities emerge as a response to state oriented struggles around ‘Kenyan’ national identity. The surveillance of women’s bodies and their sexuality is heightened during political moments of crisis, which results in discursive explosions. Dominant responses within popular discourse in Kenya that continue to place analytical value within structures and the rights framework as the only way to rewrite Kenya’s ethnic political history are limited.
