Situating "wicked" women: gender panic and savoir vivre in urban Senegal

Oudenhuijsen, L.W. (2025)

Doctoral Thesis

This thesis analyses women’s gender and sexual dissidence in relation to social transformations in Senegal. Through a focus on the everyday lives of three groups of women who transgress Senegalese gender norms – féministes (F: feminists), lesbiennes (F: lesbians) and ñi génn guddi (W: those who go out at night, that is who engage in commercial sex) – this thesis explores how women shape their lives while navigating public debates, gender panic, and the policing of gender norms that results from gender panic in Senegal. In a context of virulent anti-queer public debates, most women avoid the public sphere and find spaces to craft dissident lives for themselves through the use of trickery, secrecy and ambiguity. This craftiness is learned and developed in conjunction with others, and women’s kinship bonds appear as a particularly important site of collective knowledge production (savoir vivre). This thesis concludes that while these kinship bonds and social relations between women are not free from conflict, they nevertheless remain central for women to survive together under socially and economically adverse conditions.

• Senegal
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Anthropology
• Homosexuality
• Feminism
• Sex work
• Kinship
• Secrecy

• All authors: Oudenhuijsen, L.W.
• Supervisor: Dijk, R.A. van; Spronk, R.
• Committee: Barendregt, B.A.; Kaag, M.M.A.; Bruijn, M.E. de; Dankwa, S.O.; Mbaye, A.C.
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University
• Date: 2025-03-05