Majczak, Ewa

Dr., Postdoctoral researcher in Anthropology,
University of Oxford (UK)

In this paper I examine how female citizens are visually crafted in Yaoundé Cameroon by focusing on state parades (esp. 8 March) and ensuing photographs. Important social and economic resources are needed to beautify oneself, prepare for and participate in such parades. I want to think state parades and photographs as generating national interests or desires, in this case to make Cameroon look good. I frame aesthetics as an affective field (Thrift, Meyer) and state parades and ensuing photographs as visual technologies of public intimacy.

First, I will draw out how the aesthetic norms of the state have been shaped in conjunction with and through church norms, discourses and practices since the independence of Cameroonian nation state. Second, I will show how these norms are embedded in contemporary national laws aimed to control female appearance in public space and how they shape female beautification for engagements in state parades, prolonged through ensuing photographs. I will discuss how the ‘aesthetics of order’ engineered in the early Cameroonian republic days came to accompany the ‘aesthetics of disorder’ emerging in the post-cold war period. Third, I will show how these sets of aesthetics intertwine today through a common aesthetic of glamour in state parades.

The aesthetic quality, glamour, is also what articulates the relationship between state and capitalism, wherein desire for glamour produces the desire for the state among young women partaking in state parades. In other words, the aesthetic of glamour reproduces state as an object of intense investment and desire (Butler) for young women participating in state parades. It is a desire to make Cameroon look good (or glamourous) wherein glamour works as a form of subjectification aiming to produce glamourous citizens. Those who achieve to make and maintain glamour can claim various upward social mobility benefits in a Yaoundé fraught by ethnic, gender and gerontocratic hierarchies and divides; making glamour a new quality on which claims to inclusion by young urban women in Cameroonian post-millennial politics of belonging (Geschiere) are being made.