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CHALLENGING THE NORMS OF "PROPER" DAUGHTERS AND WIVES:THE INTIMATE LIVES OF A GROUP OF FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN MEKELLE (TIGRAY) AND THEIR CLAIM FOR MODERN IDENTITY [Abstract ID: 1101-07]
The wide spread of contraception in Ethiopia has separated sexuality from fertility in deeper ways. On the one hand, verginity till marriage and one-to-one intimate relationships are embodied as part of normative feminity. On the other hand, for a new generation of urban and educated young women, extramarital affairs, framing in the ideals of romantic and passionate love fostered by new media that give lively texts and depictions through which imagine the tensions between family and individual expectations, wealth and poverty, “modernity” and “tradition” (Bryce 1997; Liechty 2003), are claimed as part of a modern and cosmopolitan feminity (Hirsch, Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007; Cole, Thomas 2009).Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mekelle (Tigray) among female university students, the in depth-intereviews with these educated women showed as the sexual practices constitute a physical and social terrain where young girls are challenging the normative expectation of respectability, transgressing the norms of “proper” daughters and wives, and a space through which negotiate a more egalitarian gender roles and new pattern of relationship.This “double standard” on female sexuality, the one that recognises the value of chastity and the one that sees sexuality.