Desire, Deviance, and Social Judgment: Reframing Moral Decay in Little Rot and You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17605/cajssh.v7i3.1335Keywords:
Moral Decay, Social Perception, Deviance, Gender, Urban Modernity, African FictionAbstract
This paper interrogates the relationship between desire, deviance, and social judgment in the fiction of Akwaeke Emezi, focusing on Little Rot (2024) and You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022). Rather than treating moral decay as an objective condition or a straightforward marker of social decline, the study reconceptualises it as a category produced through perception, discourse, and normative regulation. Drawing on Critical Social Theory, the analysis demonstrates that Emezi’s narratives destabilise fixed moral categories by foregrounding the fluidity of desire, the uneven application of judgment, and the persistence of gendered double standards. Urban space emerges as a crucial site in which deviance is simultaneously normalised and selectively sanctioned, revealing the contradictions that underpin contemporary moral discourse. Across both texts, acts that attract condemnation are shown to depend less on intrinsic ethical content than on visibility, context, and the positionality of the subject involved. In this sense, morality operates less as a stable framework of values than as a shifting system of social interpretation. The article argues that what is commonly described as moral decay is better understood as the outcome of social judgment functioning as a form of regulation, through which certain desires and identities are marked as deviant while others remain unexamined. By repositioning morality within the dynamics of perception and power, the study reframes moral decay not as ethical collapse but as a contested narrative shaped by the politics of seeing, naming, and judging.
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