The Colonial Christian Kernel of African Anti-LGBT+ Politics and Queer Humanitarianism: Conversation with Kwame E. Otu (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
Same-Sex sexual relationship continues to be a criminal offence in Ghana under the carnal knowledge clause instituted by the British during colonization. Although the law does not specifically mention same-sex sexual relations, carnal knowledge criminalizes all forms of nonheterosexual sexual activities. The criminalization of same-sex sexual relations has sparked an intense debate about African subjectivity. On the one hand, many African nationalists and most Christian organizations argue that same-sex sexual relations is unAfrican; this enables them to both subjugate queers while not having to defend their views more explicitly. Others (typically academics) have explored the existence of diverse sexual behaviors over many generations in many African countries, which were not necessarily condoned, but did not have dire social consequences (Murray, & Roscoe, 1997). Therefore, using critical discourse analysis as theory and method, this dissertation examines how the queer Ghanaian su...
The Politics of Homosexuality in Africa
Critical African Studies, 2017
This special issue sheds lights on The Politics of Homosexuality in Africa through a series of in-depth analyses and ethnographic accounts that challenge existing essentialisms while bringing to bear a more complex and subtle representation of queer politics on the continent. In building, and yet departing from, the emerging scholarship on this topic, the contributions to this volume underline how the often-cited draconian legislations, the state-sponsored homophobic violence, and the heated public debates on homosexuality, should be seen not simply as the product of political chicanery and Pentecostal religious fervour, but as part of the (re)-emergence and (re)-articulation in postcolonial Africa of old and novel discourses on African independence and nation-building, of citizenship and human rights, and of morality and the place and recognition of Africa, and Africans, in the world. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2017.1282724
Being Gay and African: A View from an African Philosopher
Phronimon
In recent times there has been an upsurge in the rejection of gay orientation. A number of African countries have openly legislated against homosexual acts to undergird the belief that such orientation is alien to being African. The vitriol directed at gay people does not make much sense apart from displaying either a deep-seated resentment for the persons or their orientation. What seems valuable and worth of engagement is the claim that being gay or upholding same-sex orientation, is essentially un-African. By setting up a charitable interpretation of what opponents of same-sex relations could possibly take African reality to be, I chart a way that seeks to establish whether their interpretation of that reality is philosophically sound. What could be the basis of objections to homosexuality? What values do they articulate? Crucial to this consideration is the idea of harm. While societies are entitled to protecting themselves (through legislation and other actions if need be) from...
Queering the Racial Other: Towards a Queer Africa
New Literaria An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities ISSN- 2582-7375 [Online], 2023
This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21 st century African literature. Africa's history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka's portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka's character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21 st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature-Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that 'homosexuality is un-African' on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works rewrite the history of African queer people into the nation's body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics.
Queer in Africa - LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism
Vasu Reddy, Surya Monro, and Zethu Matebeni - Queer in Africa - LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism , 2018
Sexuality in Africa is a multifaceted domain, deeply material (visceral, embodied, and politicised), and, like gender, informed by interlocking political, social, class, religious, cultural, and economic interests. ‘Sexual politics’ undergirds the circuits of power informing the shape, architecture, and patterns of African queer lives because the gendered hierarchy is sexualised by powerful cisgender men and states, anchored in patriarchy, and in turn circumscribed by heteropolar regimes of gender that make sex dangerous for sexual minorities. Therefore, to be queer in Africa is to be in effect constrained and regulated by the ‘heterosexual matrix’ ( Butler 1999 ), ‘the straight mind’ ( Wittig 1992 ), and the ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ ( Rich 1980 ) that informs the hegemonic order of heterosexuality. Gender variance in Africa is similarly constricted by compulsory gender binarism, patriarchy, and heterosexism.
Queer Pan-Africanism in Contemporary Africa
Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, 2020
This chapter focuses on pan-Africanist discourses in contemporary Africa specifically in relation to the politics of sexual and gender diversity. It begins by examining the populist use of pan-Africanist rhetoric in narratives mobilizing against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) identities and rights. It then proceeds by discussing an emerging counter-narratives employed by LGBTI activists, communities, and allies, in which pan-Africanist thought is used to reimagine Africa from queer perspectives. Finally, it examines the strategic invocation of transatlantic black memory and black traditions of thought within these pan-Africanist queer counter-narratives and explores their political significance. Thus, this chapter foregrounds and explores how, in the words of Hakima Abbas and Amina Mama, 'Pan-Africanism as theory and praxis is in constant dialectic with other African political and intellectual thought including socialism, Black consciousness, Black nationalism, African queer thought and activism, as well as in polemic counter-position with present-day manifestations of imperialism.'
Against the background of the HIV epidemic and the intense public controversy on homosexuality in African societies, this article investigates the discourses of academic African Christian theologians on homosexuality. Distinguishing some major strands in African theology, that is, inculturation, liberation, women's and reconstruction theology, the article examines how the central concepts of culture, liberation, justice, and human rights function in these discourses. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of a large number of publications, the article shows that stances of African theologians are varying from silence and rejection to acceptance. Although many African theologians have taken up the cudgels against gay rights, some “dissident voices” break the taboo and develop more inclusive concepts of African identity and African Christianity.
Queer studies and religion in Southern Africa: The production of queer Christian subjects
Religion Compass, 2020
The question of how to write about queer Africa has been a significant debate in scholarship over the last decade. One of the key emerging areas, in the development of 'queer Africa scholarship' has been through the framing of queer African subjects at the intersections with religion and in particular, Christianity. As scholars begin to further imagine queer African subjects as Christian, it is important to explore how and in what ways these subjectivities are constructed. In this article, I apply a qualitative analysis to academic literature that explicitly focuses on, or includes a substantive analysis of queer Christians and/or queer Christianity in Southern Africa. While Southern Africa is not representative of the entire continent, this region is a productive site within which to understand how queer subjects are imagined to be situated, what they are imagined to be doing and how they are imagined to be doing what they do. The context produces queer and LGBTI þ (this acronym is sometimes preferred to 'queer' to refer collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and in various other ways as gender and/or sex non-conforming.) subjects who find and make religious homes within legally permissive and restrictive countries and do so through a variety of normative, queer and normatively queer ways, thus revealing religious and sexual contradictions and boundary crossing. This has opened up numerous ways of understanding how religion can be negotiated and transformed in this region. I conclude by examining the theoretical and epistemological possibilities that are revealed through the current