Beyond the Fattening Room: Crafting femininities in life and art in southeastern Nigeria

University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections (RCC) recently acquired culturally significant African artworks commissioned in the 1970s by British art historian, Jill Salmons, and her late husband, the ethnographer, Keith Nicklin. Among the collection are five wooden figurines depicting ‘fattening room’ maidens. Once common in Nigeria’s Cross River region, the ‘fattening room’ was a space of seclusion and physical, aesthetic, and moral transformation for pubescent girls. Fed and waited on over several months, girls emerged as women ready for marriage and motherhood. Today, ‘fattening rooms’ are largely defunct. Urbanisation, a greater importance placed on formal education, the spread of Pentecostal Christianity, and an increased awareness of medical interventions surrounding childbirth have meant that the expectations placed on girls and their transitions to adulthood have changed significantly. Despite this, the image of the ‘fattening room’ maiden remains iconic, epitomising femininity and fecundity. These ‘fattening room’ figurines – instantly recognisable yet obscuring contemporary lived experiences – call into question the ways in which Cross Riverian young women must navigate competing ideals of femininity to ‘grow up’ into socially recognised adults. Equally, Nigeria’s changing social landscape raises questions about how to communicate the significance of these art objects to different publics as they are re-homed in RCC’s African Collection. Beyond the Fattening Room puts the five ‘fattening room’ figurines in dialogue with women’s contemporary lived experiences, creating a ‘third space’ between art and social life in which to explore feminine ideals in Cross River and reflect on how they are crafted. The project has two distinct but interlinked aims: 1) understand continuities and tensions between past and contemporary feminine ideals in Cross River, providing insights into the challenges that women face and the relationships and practices shaping their experiences, particularly of motherhood; 2) introduce an important new dimension into recent decolonial debates within museum studies by presenting a case study for evaluating how care of an African art collection requires engaging objects in social life. A collaboration with RCC in Birmingham and a women’s rights advocate in Nigeria, the project has four objectives: 1) Employing experimental ethnographic methodologies, conduct fieldwork in Calabar, Nigeria, to understand women’s lived experiences. Use the figurines to elicit life histories and create artistic responses, enabling Cross Riverian women to ‘speak back’ to feminine ideals; 2) Exhibit the ‘fattening room’ figurines and their artistic responses to publics in Nigeria and Birmingham, encouraging feedback through a project website; 3) Hold stakeholder workshops in Calabar, using project’s findings to identify solutions to improve maternal care practice and women’s wellbeing; 4) Hold a symposium in Birmingham to discuss best practice for using African art objects in socially transformative research, creating a ‘tool kit’ for advising other UK-based collections. Beyond benefitting women of reproductive ages and healthcare stakeholders in Calabar, RCC and UK-based collections, the project benefits me by further establishing myself as an anthropologist of gendered lived experience; extending my methodological expertise; providing close mentorship; developing non-academic partnerships and offering experience of public engagement activities, laying pathways to future impactful research.