She is my husband

The woman-to-woman marriage is a practice that has been encountered in many African realities and explained from the functionalist point of view as a way to fill the gap of fertility, or from the feminist school which focus purely on the women’s perspective. The innovation of this research is its deep insight into the practice as such, with special attention on both men and women’s interactions and the way they are navigating through different local and global discourses and dilemmas, such as marriage, procreation, forms of relatedness, Christianity, authority. The objective is thus to avoid illustrating the marriage as a purely traditional practice which is ‘surviving’ today, at the risk of describing the ‘exotic’ other, different from the West. In order to do it, the book looks at the appropriation of the practice in interaction with respect to several situations, but more precisely, it shows how the woman-to-woman marriage itself mediates several practices. This research focuses on the marriage in the rural part of Tanzania, in Mara region, where the Simbiti people live.