Boundaries of beauty: Tattooed secrets of women's history in Magude District, Southern Mozambique

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 106-141

  Gengenbach, Heidi ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 9344220592     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2003.0007     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. E. Dora Earthy, Valenge Women: The Social and Economic Life of the Valenge Women of Portuguese Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 102.
2. Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999);
3. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991);
4. and Luise White, Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 25.
6. There is a large literature on female genital excision, but this body-altering practice lacks the graphic dimension of tattooing, and does not lend itself to analysis as text in the same way. See, for example, Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989);
7. Susan Pedersen, "National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 647-80;
8. and Lynn M. Thomas, "'Ngaitana (I will circumcise myself)': The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1956 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya," Gender and History 8, no. 3 (1996): 338-63.
9. Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
10. and Margot Mifflin, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo (New York: Power House Cultural Entertainment, 1997).
11. Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, "The Marked and the Un(re)marked: Tattoo and Gender in Theory and Narrative," in Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment, 147.
12. For the history of the Gaza Nguni kingdom, see Lisa A. Brock, "From Kingdom to Colonial District: A Political Economy of Social Change in Gazaland, Southern Mozambique, 1870-1930," (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1989);
13. and Gerhard Liesegang, "Notes on the Internal Structure of the Gaza Kingdom of Southern Mozambique, 1840-1895," in Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, ed. J. Peires (Grahamstown: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, 1981).
14. and Alan K. Smith, "The Peoples of Southern Mozambique: An Historical Survey," Journal of African History 14, no. 4 (1973): 565-80.
15. Renamo was the Mozambique National Resistance, a guerrilla movement formed by the Rhodesian government in the mid-1970s to destabilize independent Mozambique. William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992),
16. and Alex Vines, RENAMO: Terrorism in Mozambique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
17. Janet Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1993).
18. William M. White, Journal of a Voyage Performed in the Lion extra Indiaman, from Madras to Colombo and Da Lagoa Bay . . . in the Year 1798 (London, 1800), 27.
19. Gerhard Liesegang, "Lourenço Marques antes de 1895: Aspectos da História dos Estados Vizinhos, da Interacçao entre a Povoaçao e Aqueles Estados e do Comércio na Baia na Povoaçao," Arquivo 2 (1987): 53.
20. Albasini ruled as a "white chief" over these refugees, who were fleeing from famine, warfare, and Nguni military conscription. See Junod, "The Ba-Thonga of the Transvaal," 222;
21. Jane Caplan, "'Speaking Scars': the Tattoo in Popular Practice and MedicoLegal Debate in Nineteenth-Century Europe," History Workshop Journal 44 (autumn 1997): 107-42.
22. H.A. Junod, La Tribu et la Langue Thonga (Lausanne, 1896), 16-17,
23. and H.A. Junod, Life of a South African Tribe (2d. ed., London, 1962), 1,178-79.
24. Junod, La Tribu et la Langue Thonga, 17,
25. and Junod, Life of a South African Tribe I, 179.
26. St. Vincent Erskine, "Journey of Exploration to the Mouth of the River Limpopo," Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 39 (1869): 238.
27. Frederick Elton, "Journal of an Exploration of the Limpopo River," Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 42 (1872): 37.
28. Earthy, Valenge Women, 107. Earthy described the VaLenge as a group of mixed Shangaan-Chopi origins.
29. st ed., Neuchatel: Attinger Frères, 1913), 1,180.
30. Manuel Simöes Alberto, "Mutilaçôes Etnicas entre os Negros de Moçambique," Boletim da Sociedade de Estudos de Moçambique, 25, 90 (1955): 35-44.
31. For a sensitive discussion of beauty in one African context, see Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Radiance From the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
32. For female rural-to-urban migration, see Jeanne Penvenne, "Seeking the Factory for Women: Mozambican Urbanization in the Late Colonial Era," Journal of Urban History 23, no. 3 (1997): 342-79.
33. For a critique of the "women left behind" model, see Karen Jochelson, "Women, Migrancy and Morality: A Problem of Perspective," Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (June 1995): 323-32.
34. Paulus Gerdes, Women, Art, and Geometry in Southern Africa (Trenton: African World Press, 1998) explores the mathematical logic behind these tattooing patterns.
35. See Bridget O'Laughlin, "Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of the Indigenato in Mozambique," African Affairs 99 (January 2000): 5-42;
36. and Jeanne M. Penvenne, "'We Are All Portuguese!' Challenging the Political Economy of Assimilation, Lourenço Marques, 1870-1933," in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
37. Jeanne M. Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), 467.
38. Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900-1982 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983), 40.