Title: Women who pay their own brideprice: reimagining provider masculinity through Uganda's thriving wedding industry
Domain: philosophy

Question: How does the emergence of women who pay their own brideprice has invited a broad reimagining of the gendered economic ideologies that tether men to money under the rubric of provider masculinity in Uganda?

Background: 1.The trappings of wedding ceremonies become ever more sumptuous across sub-Saharan Africa, and the inability to afford marriage | payments has left young men ‘stuck in the compound’. | 2.Ugandan women are reported to benefit from ever-increasing economic opportunity, which leads the fact that young men unable to afford their weddings and young women out-earning their male peers. | 3.A curious phenomenon has emerged: "women who pay their own brideprice", which refers to a range of economic practices undertaken by brides against the conventional, if aspirational, notion that men should pay for the events enitrely.

Definitions: 1.provider masculinity:A culturally specific ideal of masculinity in which a man's identity, status, and moral worth are closely tied to his ability to financially support his family or dependents. | 2.brideprice:A cultural practice in which the groom or his family gives wealth or goods to the bride's family as part of the marriage arrangement.

Methodology: 1.Examining transformations in Ugandan wedding practices, with a focus on revisiting the normative as a potent site for observing gendered social change.2.Focusing on bridewealth practices and the phenomenon of women paying their own bridewealth in the context of Uganda’s shifting economic landscape, with particular attention to the relationship between money and intimacy, and to the transformation of gendered economic arrangements.

Answer: 1.Ugandan wedding and marriage traditions are changing | The government's stance on women's and LGBT rights is that they are foreign, brought to Uganda by Westerners to destroy African Christian values. | Uganda's contemporary legal framework for marriage is a colonial leftover, enshrined in the 1904 Marriage Act, which recognizes customary as well as religious ceremonies and civil unions. | Brideprice especially has become a flashpoint in the debates of marriage in Uganda. | 2.Ugandan's growing opulence of contemporary weddings | Grooms of the past proved their worth to their in-laws by showing humility, meaning avoiding eye contact and never speaking directly to their future kin. Now, grooms show their worth by 'splashing money', even if they can only temporarily rent the vehicles, stereo systems, and refrigerators they present as the wedding prestation. | Setting an official 'price' for marriage payments allowed missionaries and state officials seeking to settle legal disputes or convert followers to determine who was married to whom, and when the marriage began. More recently, Ugandan government officials have tried to regulate wedding expenditures by setting the nominal 'price' of a marriage exchange. | Conclusion: Ugandan's contemporary weddings are becoming increasingly luxurious. | 3.Reality television and the wedding industry boom | The 'lavish' commercialization of weddings Ugandans complained of in the 2010s is tied to the explosive growth of the country's wedding industry. The wedding industry boomed following economic liberalization, and its continued growth is fuelled by pop-cultural media, which serves both as a key authority on wedding trends and a key source of blame for their growing opulence. | Properly documenting one's wedding is one of the event's most significant costs. Tailored specifically for each couple, the production and public circulation of wedding media reflect both conventions and reimaginations of love, romance, and the material conditions of marriage. Couples have also been paying to have their ceremonies professionally filmed and televised since the mid-2000s on shows such as Okwanjula n'embaga (Introduction and wedding) and My perfect wedding. | As those wedded and waiting to wed surmise, as images of extravagant wedding spending circulate on reality television, so too do the costs of weddings increase, creating a seeming spiral of increasing demand for ever more sumptuous weddings. | Conclusion: Reality television and the booming wedding industry have increased wedding expenses. | 4.Women making marriage payments | Women raise money for weddings in several ways: through their social networks, through their parents' social networks, and from their own salaries. In each instance, women must mobilize culturally resonant forms of respectable femininity to garner financial contributions to their weddings. | Wedding fundraising typically takes place through a series of 'wedding meetings' held by the bride's family, the groom's family, and the couple themselves. That future brides and grooms hold wedding meetings together demonstrates women's key role in raising funds and couples' ability to work together as a team, to save money, and to marshal social capital into material support. | Young women also draw on their parents' social networks to raise money. In central Uganda, raising money from family friends requires young Baganda women to demonstrate they are 'well behaved', meaning raised or 'groomed'to show respect to their elders. | Some women pay the costs of their ceremonies outright, effectively sponsoring their grooms, but the practice is only discussed obliquely, in whispers, and about other people. | Women explained that paying your own brideprice to materialize a groom's masculinity was, in fact, how a bride demonstrated her value – her 'price', in a way. | Conclusion: By 2015 women paying their own brideprice was a public secret, it unsettle provider masculinity's central tenet: that men provide the money. | 5.Entrepreneurial men and wedding work | To make one's wedding extravagant, one hires top-rated wedding vendors, many of whom are university-educated young men otherwise excluded from Uganda's dismal labour economy and thus peers of the brides who employ them. | Educated young women appear to have far more access to expendable resources in the form of salaries, both than in the past and when compared with their male peers. In a context of widespread unemployment, the wedding industry provides educated men with opportunities to start businesses and earn incomes. | Beyond wages, wedding industry jobs facilitate a sense of entrepreneurial self-actualization, what Shipley calls an 'embodied poetics for business success'. As an industry, weddings provide space and time for men to cultivate aspirational fantasies towards what many consider the future for economic growth in Uganda: entrepreneurialism. | Wedding work helps men perform and feel the potential to become economically successful – and in some instances this self-fashioning also allows them to provide for their families. | Conclusion: Women who pay their own brideprice also help actualize provider masculinity among other men. | 6.Reimagining provider masculinity | That weddings generate discursive space for reflection on changing gendered norms. educated young men and women in Kampala are well aware of how concepts such as 'culture' and 'tradition' get deployed in these public debates, and the way they describe their relationship to gendered economic traditions involving brideprice ceremonies indicates these traditions are changing all the same. | Conclusion: Wedding rituals and the broader conversations they inspire provide time and space for challenging, satirizing, and tolerating transformations in the relationship between gender, money, and marriage. | | Conclusion: In Uganda, opulent weddings requiring women to help pay their own brideprice. While doing so, women are also maintaining partner's masculinity which presents economic and emotional burdens for women. Weddings, with their nostalgic invocations of gendered economic traditions, inspire thinking otherwise about what the future may hold.

Checklist: 1. Does the answer include content about Ugandan weddings becoming increasingly extravagant? | 2. Does the answer discuss the phenomenon of Ugandan women paying their own bride price? | 3. Does the answer include the view that Ugandan women paying their own bride price unsettles the central tenet of provider masculinity? | 4. Does the answer include the view that Ugandan women who pay their own bride price also help actualize provider masculinity among other men through the wedding industry? | 5. Does the answer include the view that Ugandan weddings generate a discursive space for reflection on changing gendered norms? | 6. Does the answer include the view that weddings inspire thinking otherwise about what the future may hold?