The youth sexual relationships in urban Africa are being socially constructed as an appropriate expression of intimacy, but also as a statement about a particular kind of modern identity. Kenya burgeoning commercial and the public sector have been embraced by global changes and today have reached the highest point of capitalism and has became a preserve or marketplace of sexual information, enticing eager audiences with expert radio programs, newspaper gossip columns, foreign romance novels.

Western pornographic films and bikini-clad cover girls staring the soap operas on television and smuggled DVDs tend to expand the sexual marketplace which in turn serves to further codify the category of youth, as development agents and commercial advertisement seek to appeal and to shape its young audience. I argue that the new shape of social and economic cohesion emerging in Africa now must be understood within the context of the consumer culture and trends moderated by technology based on commodities rather than physical ventures.

By reviewing literature from multiple works, this paper intends to delve into what it means to be male and female in modern Kenyan contexts; assess different ways in which sexualities have been constructed, performed, and resisted by the youth.

Often times, the discussion of rape and other forms of sexual violence privileges women as victims to the negligence of men who, though may suffer sexual violence primarily or secondarily, are usually only seen as perpetrators. This work by psychoanalyzing the characters in the film, Femi Kayode's Tango with Me, establishes that men are also victims of rape. Produced and directed by Mahmood Ali-Balogun, the film explores the trauma of being raped, watching one's spouse raped and the difficulty of accepting the resultant pregnancy. Even though the wife receives the physical impact/violence, the husband is seen as an equal victim of the rape. The man and woman experience differing degrees of trauma requiring different coping strategies ranging from psychotherapy/professional counselling to validation of manhood, support from loved ones, personal resolve to accept self, and recourse to faith in a higher power. Much of the difficulty experienced by the couple arises from society's disposition to rape: the culture of silence and stigmatization of victims. Though set in the city, the characters' behavioural traits and reactions to rape are more rural than urban, even while they reach out for urban remedies. Also, traditional gender roles, a carryover from rural consciousness, account for the recovery rate in the male and female victims: the sustained perception of females as victims has psychologically conditioned them to recover faster than their male counterparts from the trauma of rape. The rural and urban spaces each provide elements that both make and mar the couple's journey to recovery.

This paper aims to explore Nicole Amarteifio's web series An African City (2014-present) delving into the politics of self-empowerment and sexual agency. An African City offers a rich and multifaceted insight into the lives of five female returnees re-discovering themselves and seeking professional success as they find their way in the modern lifestyle of Accra, a city represented both as dominated by patriarchal morals and as a cosmopolitan place with business opportunities for young entrepreneurs. I propose to analyze An African City in terms of rejecting rigid patterns of representation and (de)moralization of African women in urban contexts, for its characters resist categorizations into unique or essentialized forms of identity. Thus, I study Amarteifio's characters in terms of their embodying independence, sexual liberation, and personal aspirations beyond being mothers and wives.

The focus will be on the characters' conception of the self, for each woman reveals different social concerns as well as different strategies for effective self-assertion and self-definition. As independent intelligent business women each of them faces and embraces sexuality from a different standpoint, questioning the concept of morality and disentangling it from sexual chastity as they adopt different perspectives in what regards body politics. The characters' multifaceted approaches towards sexual agency marks them as metonymic representations of different modes of femaleness in Africa. In this sense, An African City also reveals itself as a polyphonic narrative displaying different social responses towards women's claiming ownership of their body and the renegotiation of the concept of morality.

The rural and the urban have been overtly entwined, with one serving as 'the other side of the coin' in many situations, however, the space that once delineate the urban and rural is beginning to fade, because even in the urban, rural life can be put to play just as the urban life creeps into rural scape. The complex nature of the rural-urban life in Africa has raised more questions in delineating the rural woman or wife and her urban counterpart, because of the consistent fading of the mind's borderline.

It is in the light of this that this research (re)examines and questions the paradigm of urban-rural sexual stereotypes. How selected Nigerian women writers present this phenomenon is considered. Therefore, the psychological mingling of the rural and urban in the panes of the human mind is the focus of this study. This study does not only interrogate the stereotypes, it demonstrates otherwise the irony that is displayed by the different genders in their changing spaces. Further, the psychological complexities that take place in the plains of the mind, and how rural-urban fuse make different shades of women and wives is studied.

To achieve this, urban and rural women stereotypes are traced in African literature. Two Postcolonial Nigerian female novelists Lola Shoneyin and Chika Unigwe are closely studied. Special attention is given to their novels, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives and Midnight Dancer respectively, and a critical textual analysis is used.

Gender Construction and Diminishing Masculinity

Masculinity in the African Traditional Society is constructed through circumcision ritual which provides a stage for a transition from childhood to adulthood. This ceremony, in addition to traditional narratives, defines what and how masculinity is constructed. It equally provides space in which those going through the ritual of becoming 'men,' to demonstrate their masculinity. This paper examines how, with diminishing spread and influence of traditional circumcision ritual and rural urban migration, there is resultant diminishing masculinity and emerging search and assertion of the same through new medium. It will explore how in the absence of spaces to display and demonstrate masculinity, the urban hip hop genre is a new platform for performing masculinity. The paper therefore relies on the performance of the traditional circumcision ritual in western Kenya and Kenyan hip hop, to evaluate how shifting spaces and cultural dynamics have affected masculinity.