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Conjugality as Social Change: A Zimbabwean Case

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  • Cecile Jackson

Abstract

Understanding intrahousehold relations between spouses is central to understanding gendered wellbeing in developing countries, and therefore has engaged the attentions of economists, anthropologists, political theorists and interdisciplinary development studies. In all these fields contractualism in conceptualising conjugality and intrahousehold relations is ubiquitous, yet it implies an overly static and compelling structuralist logic, which this article questions. A better understanding of agency and change, in relation to marriage, matters for both the conceptualisation of intrahousehold relations, and for a range of policy initiatives, for example gender equity, or indeed HIV/AIDS, where the ability of women to instigate change in conjugality and sexual cultures is significant. This article makes no claim to represent contemporary Shona gender relations in Zimbabwe, but offers a temporal analysis of changing conjugality in south-central Zimbabwe from the colonial period into the late 1980s 1 to critique the theoretical stance of contractual approaches, through revealing the ways in which marriage has been reformulated through women's agency.

Suggested Citation

  • Cecile Jackson, 2012. "Conjugality as Social Change: A Zimbabwean Case," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(1), pages 41-54, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:48:y:2012:i:1:p:41-54
    DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2011.629649
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    1. Amartya Sen, 1987. "Gender and Cooperative Conflicts," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-1987-018, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
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    1. Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, 2019. "Gender and generational patterns of African deagrarianization: Evolving labour and land allocation in smallholder peasant household farming, 1980–2015," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 60-72.
    2. Karin Steen & Alice Antoniou & Lehnke Lindemann & Anne Jerneck, 2024. "Meanings and implications of love: review of the scholarship of love with a sub-Saharan focus," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-9, December.

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