Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi

This paper deals with young women and men's appropriation of local and global popular culture in Pumwani, a poor Nairobi neighbourhood. Local media articulate Christian ideals of marriage and gender relations, ideals, which in the West would be considered conservative. In a Kenyan context the ideals support the transformation of extended family systems, based on a clear separation of functions between generations and sexes, into 'modem' nuclear families, which are ..more fluid, and where power may be distributed more equally between sexes and generations. Influential global popular culture narratives, such as the television soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, and several situation comedies, featuring African American stars, also support ideals of equality between the sexes and generations, implicit in the modern love marriage and nuclear family ideal. At the same time they may seem to encourage non-binding love affairs. The role of popular culture in central areas of life is increasing in tandem with a general social transformation, which renders the authority of older generations and also of church and state debatable. The arguments of the paper are based on group and life history interviews and surveys of work and leisure activities of a group of fairly well educated but mostly out-of-work or self-employed young men and women. Accounts of selected popular culture texts and reception analyses of visual material supplement the sociological approaches. The conclusion of the article is that young women in particular make use of a public sphere, understood as a process of articulation. The discursive spaces opened up by media do not have the barriers, which elsewhere keep women and poor people from taking part in debates on key social and moral questions. In that sense they contribute significantly to the creation of a democratic public sphere