Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya

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Abstract
Among the Nandi, only men can hold and manage land and livestock, the means of production, but these are transmitted through women and rights therein devolve to a woman''s house at marriage and can never be revoked. Woman marriage is the outcome of this contradiction between men''s and women''s rights in the house-property complex. Some of the most important attributes of the category man in Nandi culture have to do with management of the family estate. These 2 facts explain why the female husband is culturally conceptualized as a man. She must manage property because of her special circumstances, but a female holder, manager and exchanger of property is extremely anomalous. She is culturally recorded as a man to reduce the contradiction implicit in her role with regard to property. This explains why informants insist that the female husband is a man, and why her attempts to behave as a man are most pronounced in the areas of life that have the most bearing upon the family estate and heirship to it. The degree to which the status, role and behavior of a female husband approximates that of an actual man in various areas of ideology and activity was reviewed in an attempt to show that the closer one gets to issues of property and heirship, the stronger the dogma that the female husband is a man; the further removed from these issues, the more this dogma is diminished. Informants strive for logical consistency and extend this ideology, which is so important in the domain of property relations, into other domains. The female husband may become an intermediate category between male and female. In areas removed from property relations and not crucial to the female husband''s male status, but generally important to the culturally constructed man, the ambiguity is greatest. It is in these areas (e.g., political participation, male initiation) that the dogma that the female husband is a man is defended.

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