Corrie Decker

"Gender, Sexuality and the Body"

A Cultural History of Youth in the Age of Empire

While discourses on adolescence at the beginning of the nineteenth century were decidedly masculinist, by the early twentieth century attention shifted toward female bodies and young people’s sexuality. This trend in Western scholarship, however, does not necessarily reflect the realities “on the ground” everywhere during this period. The tendency in most cultures for girls to transition rapidly between childhood and adulthood partly explains the absence of female youth in the historical archive. In the early nineteenth century, many teenage girls were slaves, wives, and concubines, but rarely recognized as youth in their own right culturally or socially. In contrast, historical records point to lively debates about the socialization of boys and young men, the recruitment of boys and young men into armies or labor systems, the spread of formal or standardized education or training programs for male youth, and the notion that the future of the nation or empire rested in the bodies and minds of young men. By the late nineteenth century, the rise of the medical discourse on puberty and legal debates about age of consent brought girls into the center of debates about youth.

David Pomfret, ed., Oxford University Press (2023)

"A “Tomboy” and a “Lady”: Religion, Modernity, and Youth Culture in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar "

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture

Religion remained a significant factor in youth cultures that emerged during the twentieth century, and it continues to do so in the twenty-first century. In many places around the world, religious ideals held singular importance for young people’s understanding of themselves and their relationships with family members and friends. This is certainly the case in many Muslim societies. Understanding the role of religion in modern youth culture requires a deep engagement with young people’s personal experiences as well as the discourses that sought to circumscribe young people’s actions.

James Martin, ed., Bloomsbury Publishing (2021)

"Sexuality in Colonial Africa: Current Trends and New Directions"

The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism

Unique in its global and interdisciplinary scope, this collection will bring together comparative insights across European, Ottoman, Japanese, and US imperial contexts while spanning colonized spaces in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural, intellectual and political history, anthropology, law, gender and sexuality studies, and literary criticism, The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism combines regional and historiographic overviews with detailed case studies, making it the key reference for up-to-date scholarship on the intimate dimensions of colonial rule.

Chelsea Schields and Dagmar Herzog, eds., Routledge (2021)

"A Feminist Methodology of Age-Grading and History in Africa"

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020

Age is an essential category of analysis for African history. For over a century, social scientists have emphasized the central role of age-grading in African cultures. Whereas most people in precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors vs. seniors), European colonialism expanded the legal importance of chronological age. Gender mattered to both definitions of age. Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages—one based on relational (male) seniority and the other on chronological age—African women growing up during the colonial period found new ways to assert a sense of belonging among generations of women. I argue in favor of a feminist methodology that recognizes the broader trend among a generation of young women in Africa who employed conflicts over age to assert their maturity, and in doing so located themselves in their own histories. Identifying female age sets and generations thus offers new perspectives on how African girls and women make and remake history.

"The Search for Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial Zanzibar, East Africa"

Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice

Ages of Anxiety presents six case studies of juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century from around the world, adding context to the urgent and international conversation about youth, crime, and justice. After providing an international perspective on the social history of ideas about how children are different from adults, the contributors explain why those differences should matter for the administration of justice. They examine how reformers used the idea of modernization to build and legitimize juvenile justice systems in Europe and Mexico, and present histories of policing and punishing youth crime.

William Bush and David Tanenhaus, eds., New York University Press (2018)

"Schoolgirls and Women Teachers: Colonial Education and the Shifting Boundaries Between Girls and Women in Zanzibar"

Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast

In Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and gender studies scholars examine Islam, sexuality, gender, and marriage on the Swahili coast and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The book examines diverse sites of empowerment, contradiction, and resistance affecting cultural norms, Islam and ideas of Islamic authenticity, gender expectations, ideologies of modernity, and British education. The book’s attention to both masculinity and femininity, broad examination of the transnational space of the Swahili coast, and inclusion of research on non-Swahili groups on the East African coast makes it a unique and indispensable resource.

Erin Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson, eds., Ohio University Press (2015)

"The Elusive Power of Colonial Prey: Sexualizing the Schoolgirl in the Zanzibar Protectorate"

Africa Today Vol. 61, no. 4, Special Issue on Love & Sex in Islamic Africa

Close reading of a 1934 case in which a doctor working for Zanzibar’s Medical Services Department stood accused of having “immoral intent” to seduce a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl illuminates the reasons for and effects of the sexualization of Zanzibari schoolgirls in colonial discourse. This article traces the shift in colonial objectives to protect unmarried adolescent girls—first from local practices, such as child marriage and later from girls’ own curiosities about “modern” fashion, dancing, and dating. In this construct, schoolgirls became mature and flirtatious sexual creatures who enticed adult men already weakened by the tropical environment of the East African islands. Both actors—the schoolgirl and the colonial official—toyed with the secret of sex that lay at the heart of Islamic female seclusion, symbolized by the veil. In this case and others involving sexual and sexualized schoolgirls, her ignorance about sex was as vital as her virginity.

"Biology, Islam and the Science of Sex Education in Colonial Zanzibar"

Past & Present, Volume 222, Issue 1, February 2014

In recent years, female sexuality and attempts to control it have sometimes served as signs of a growing global divide between Islamic and Western nations. The banning of the headscarf in France, for example, ostensibly an attempt by a secular government to liberate its female subjects, was more a political response to the perceived cultural inferiority of the nation’s Muslim immigrants.1 In colonial Zanzibar, by contrast, the control of female sexuality initially offered an opportunity for European colonizers to ally with their Arab counterparts.

"Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions: Coming of Age in Mombasa's Colonial Schools"

Girlhood: A Global History (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies)

Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience. Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.

Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos, eds., Rutgers University Press (2010)