The IMAGENU project: Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda has now been running for two years. According to the original plans, fieldwork should be coming to an end, but due to the COVID19 pandemic, not all fieldwork has been completed. However, all researchers have been able to do some fieldwork and have data and considerations which can be presented and discussed.

In our opening workshop (2019) we focused on methodology and literature and in our first-year workshop (2020) we focused on marriage and partnership. In this workshop we shall focus on discussions of gender. Obviously, all these themes are closely connected.

Gender is a theme that preoccupies policymakers, development practitioners and citizens alike. Policymakers and practitioners envision gender equality and the empowerment of women. For citizens, gender issues are present in their lives within the domestic realm of partnerships, household and family. Citizens are concerned about partnerships, livelihood, access to land and children’s futures, and about the mental and reproductive health issues related to gender inequalities.

Early anthropological studies in Africa have focused on kinship and marriage, as in the works by Radcliffe-Brown & Forde (1950) or Mair (1969). Gender as an analytical category appeared later, in conjunction with feminist research and activism. Relieved from biological essentialism, the focus on gender as social constructions held a liberatory promise against gender inequalities. It called for a focus on women’s conditions, a vein that continues being fecund in Uganda (Obbo 1980, Kyomuhendo & McIntosh 2006, Mogensen 2011, Doss et al. 2012, Decker 2014, Hopwood 2015, Porter 2016, Porter 2017, Ossome 2014).

African scholars’ engagement with conceptualisations of gender (Amadiume 1987, Oyewumi 1997) has encouraged local redefinitions of gender vocabularies and practices, not least in Uganda (Musisi 1991, Tamale 2005). At the same time, innovative approaches like performativity and queer theory (Butler 1993), which understand gender as a precarious achievement rather than a given, have been adapted to African perspectives (Arnfred 2004): African definitions of queer have been advanced in Uganda (Nyanzi 2015), where queer studies have developed at the intersection of gender, politics and human rights (Tamale 2013; Nyanzi and Karamagi 2015; Rao 2015).

With these developments, the anthropology of gender in Africa (and Uganda) has overcome the initial focus on women, including the study of masculinities (Silberschmidt 1999, Dolan 2009, Wyrod 2016, Kizza et al. 2012, Siu et al. 2012, 2014, Vess et al. 2013), as well as that of sexuality, eroticism and desire (Oldenburg 2015). In Uganda, scholars have also addressed issues of sexuality, partnership and gender patterns in relation to the AIDS epidemic (Whyte 2005, Seeley et al. 2009, Whyte et al. 2014, Parikh 2015, Wyrod 2016).  The return to kinship in the new kinship and gender studies (Carsten 2003) has only scarcely influenced research in Africa, which do not address explicitly the relation of gender with marriage, the latter’s decline, and its implications for gender relations, kinship and children in specific arenas of family life (a notable exception is Pauli 2019 on Namibia).

While the increasingly complex articulations and fluidities of the concept of gender have led to questioning of its analytical validity (Miescher et al. 2007), the IMAGENU research project explores gender as a relevant category for the everyday lives of citizens and authorities in Uganda, and one that informs people’s relationships and dreams. IMAGENU provides a new perspective on gender and futures by placing marriage and its decline at the centre, showing how this most fundamental gender relation implicates livelihoods, education, health and people’s imaginations, expectations and hopes for the future.We investigate the new forms of gender relations that are replacing formal marriage. The project aims to be comparative in four ways: we examine both male and female situations; we trace changes by comparing grandparents, middle-aged parents, and youth; we attend to socio-economic (class, education, urban/rural) differences; we bring together studies from greater northern and eastern Uganda.

We invite all researchers to submit an abstract of 200 words by January 10, 2021 and then a paper of max 5000 words by January 20, 2021 focusing on gender aspects of your research. If possible, please attend to language and terms used in your empirical material about gender, sex, men, women, boys, girls, marriage, partnership, and other relevant terms. Send them to Lotte Meinert at lotte.meinert@cas.au.dk and Julaina Obika at j.obika@gu.ac.ug.

Based on the abstracts we will finalise the program and the papers will be circulated before the workshop and sent to our keynote speakers Prof. Shanti Parikh, Prof. Julia Pauli and Dr. Lyn Ossome.