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Mehita Iqani and Simidele Dosekun (eds), African Luxury: aesthetics and politics. Bristol: Intellect (pb 25 [pounds sterling]-978 1 7893 8221 l). 2020, v + 172 pp. This book breaches a [...]

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: marriage, sexuality, and urban life in colonial Libreville, Gabon. Athens OH: Ohio University Press (hb US$80-9780 821421192; pb US$32.95-9780821421208). 2014, 336 pp. Rachel Jean-Baptiste's compelling book [...]

BARBARA ANN BARRETT and CHRISTIAN GROES-GREEN, Studying Intimate Matters: engaging methodological challenges in studies on gender, sexuality and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa. Kampala: Fountain Publishers (pb $6 978 9 [...]

This article is an ethnographic study of emergent discourses, practices, and institutions focused on mental health and psychotherapy in Uganda. It compares the recent rise of a psy- dispositif in two very different settings: postwar northern Uganda, which has become a hub for international trauma interventions, and Kampala, the capital, where a small group of Ugandan psychotherapists has established a number of private practices, which mainly cater to the (upper) middle classes. The article investigates the meanings of happiness and suffering in these different contexts and asks who seeks psychotherapy and why. It shows how in the context of novel discourses on mental health, and related to changing lifestyles and images of the self, new struggles to be happy are taking place, albeit in very class- and place-specific ways. Consequently, unhappiness and psychosocial suffering are becoming reasons for seeking therapy, at least for some. Such a medicalization of unhappiness, manifested most prominently in the popular idiom of depression, reflects a global trend and has led to the soaring consumption of antidepressants and rising popularity of psychotherapy, particularly in the United States. As such, this article seeks to make a contribution to recent anthropological debates on happiness, suffering, and global mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tension between same-sex sexual practices and eroticism, on the one hand, and theoretical investigations on sexual diversity, on the other. The author’s analysis is based on research in Ghana and Kenya over the last two decades. A significant proportion of the people she met have (had) experience with same-sex sexual practices at some point in their life. Their choice to start and continue with it and in what form differed considerably per person and over their life course. These diverse possibilities throw an interesting light on the question of sexual diversity, which tends to be locked in a Western paradigm based on binary oppositions of female vs male, homosexual vs heterosexual and non-Western vs Western. While this paradigm has been criticized, theory on sexual diversity nevertheless inclines towards focusing on difference from the norm as its standpoint and therefore always implies non-heterosexuality. The author argues that African contemporary realities suggest innovative analytical directions of global heuristic value. Rather than focusing on self-realization based on notions of individualization, she explores the notion of well-being as put forward by Michael Jackson in Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want (2011). She explores how realizing gendered and sexual well-being is a constant struggle rather than a linear path, and how diversity comes into being as erotic practices that are generated through phases in life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]