The Entrepreneurial Feminist Subject of New Screen Media from Ghana: Labor, Pleasure, and Power

Abstract

Abstract:This analysis of recently produced women-centered media from Ghana takes up a rather uncommon theme in the study of Africa: pleasure. It considers pleasure represented in, and provided to audiences by, commercial cultural forms from Africa, which are expanding the boundaries of African subjectivity, the African future, and as I discuss here, African feminism. Pushing against the current of the dominant gender discourse, the Ghanaian media company Sparrow Productions has pioneered women-centered content built around the new Ghanaian women, a feminist ideal who is unapologetically passionate about and takes pleasure in her career, and who seeks sexual pleasure without shame and despite censure. Drawing on feminist theory as well as on Michel Foucault’s notion of the entrepreneurial subject, this article attends to the relations between pleasure and power as imagined in screen media made by Shirley Frimpong-Manso’s Sparrow Productions. It situates Sparrow Productions historically to better appreciate the advances and limitations represented by Sparrow’s new Ghanaian woman.