The Thought for Food seminar series examines challenging themes in food studies. If we are indeed what we eat, how do the lies and half-truths we consume shape our identities and behaviours? Given our colonial history, what could a just food system looks like, considering how the intersections of gender, race, class, age, and location affect access to healthful food? Are there concrete examples that we can learn from one another about food, its production and consumption, its circuits, and impact? The goal of these dialogs and presentations is to provide a platform for students, academics, activists, and policy makers to learn from ongoing work to foster more sustainable food production systems in Africa.
The UKZN Centre for Civil Society is inviting you to a Zoom Session of the CCS Webinar Series
Please note changing times to accommodate speakers from international time zones:
Seminar: Fast food, masculinity and misogyny in contemporary Zimbabwe
Speaker: Gibson Ncube
Date & Time: Thursday, 10 July 2025, 15:00-16:00 (SA Time)
Zoom Link:https://ukzn.zoom.us/j/97622873751?pwd=beabS6IlazK15ZpvAFT5IALNGHIxZT.1
Topic:
This seminar interrogates how fast-food advertising in Zimbabwe, particularly by the Mambo’s Chicken franchise, can be seen as a site for the performance and negotiation of precarious masculinities. Gibson Ncube argues that Mambo’s Chicken adverts reveal deep anxieties about masculinity, class, and power. With a marketing campaign focusing mainly on sexual innuendo, the advertisements deploy women’s bodies as metaphors to mediate male fantasies of control and upward mobility in an economically volatile postcolonial context. He demonstrates how sexual humour, prosperity gospel rhetoric, and conspicuous consumption all converge to produce what he terms “besieged masculinities”, masculinities that are hyper- visible yet fundamentally insecure. Through a critical reading of visual and textual strategies, Gibson considers the ways in which these adverts both normalise misogynistic humour and expose the fragile foundations of patriarchal desire in contemporary Zimbabwe.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Gibson Ncube is a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University. He has a C1 rating by the NRF and has published extensively on postcolonial African literatures and cultural productions. His research is interdisciplinary and spans comparative literature, queer and gender studies, and postcolonial African cultural studies. He is the author of the book Queer Bodies in African Films and has co-edited volumes examining Zimbabwe’s socio-political transitions. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of African Languages and the French Book Review Editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies. He also sits on several editorial boards, including Nomina Africana, Imbizo, and the Journal of Literary Studies and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. He also sits on the editorial boards of two book series at Manchester University Press: Governing Intimacies in the Global South and Queer and Trans History. He co-convened the Queer African Studies Association from 2020 to 2022, and in 2021, he was named the Mary Kingsley Zochonis Distinguished Lecturer by the Royal African Society.
