Fashioning futures

Project lead: Juliet Gilbert

Fashioning Futures examines the future-making strategies of single young women as they attempt to grow up into respectable adults in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I chart young women’s daily lives across various social spaces of a relatively small city. The city is shaped by Pentecostalism and patriarchal conservatism as well as the fakery, illusion and other uncertainties that have come to characterise Nigeria in recent decades. I show how young women’s ultimate aspiration of receiving a favourable marriage proposition requires them to constantly work on themselves as singletons to fashion themselves as cosmopolitan, socially mobile, stylish and spiritually wealthy young women. But that, often-times, successfully cultivating this image of feminine respectability necessitates them to engage in activities that could tarnish their reputations. Navigating social spaces such as their fathers’ houses, churches, the city’s busy streets, mobile phone communication, sewing shops and beauty parlours, young women – ever under the watchful eyes of others in and beyond the city – must deftly manage their appearances if they are to realise the futures that they believe God has planned for them.

Fashioning Futures makes a much-needed intervention in the masculine-dominated studies of youth in Africa by shedding light on the actions and aspirations of young women, a largely over-looked social group. Doing so, it complicates our understanding of youthhood, both as a time of experience and as an analytical category. For young women, the time of youth is not one of rupture but one of contingency in that this group’s much hoped-for futures depend on how well they manage their reputations as singletons.

Crucially, this quest for feminine respectability is not only hampered by the uncertainties of life in urban Nigeria. Some uncertainties, such as illusion, fakery and fraud, can also be a resource for young women to cultivate the success that could lead to a favourable marriage proposition. I show how young women not only grow up amid uncertainty but must also actively engage with it in order to grow up. Fashioning Futures illuminates how young women actively contribute to the inconsistencies of life in urban Nigeria with their own feminized versions of uncertainty.