Abstract
[...] the case studies in this volume illustrate the ways in which women, individually and collectively, push the boundaries of "acceptable" behavior. In each instance, the people confronted by these "wicked" women - whether they are husbands abandoned by their gardening wives, missionaries encountering infanticide, or fathers being taken to court by their daughters - are shocked and disappointed by female "misbehavior." Despite social, cultural, and economic coercion, however, these "wayward" wives, "misfit" mothers, and "disobedient" daughters refuse to become "good" women. Instead, they continue to live their lives outside the boundaries of "acceptable" rules and behaviors, thereby shifting their community's expectations about gender roles and relations in new directions.
As the issue title suggests, these women were often stigmatized, labelled as "wicked" or "misfit," and dismissed as mavericks by their communities and, all too often, by scholars as well. In contrast, our purpose in this special issue is to argue that these women are central to the configurations and theories of gender in Africa. Whether accused of adultery, abandonment, infanticide, or insubordination, their lives and actions often reflect and produce contradictions and contestations of power within their local communities and between the communities and the state, missionaries, and other actors. Located within the intersecting and shifting landscapes of power of the individual, family, community, and nation-state, these six articles explore how such "wicked" women and the paradoxes they generate become sites for debates over, and occasionally transformations in, definitions of gender ideas and practices, morality, authority, and other concepts. The scholars contributing to this volume try to understand how the actions and perceptions of these women shape local understandings of gender roles and relations and create the possibility for transformation.