Agenda: Empowering women for gender equity Sumptuous lives: Emancipatory narratives in selected stories from Queer Africa (2013 (original) (raw)
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Sumptuous lives: Emancipatory narratives in selected stories from Queer Africa (2013)
Agenda, 2015
In a continent notorious for its cultural negation of sexual rights, the unapologetic and intimate lived experiences of characters that populate this potpourri of short stories are an extraordinary achievement and celebration of sexual minorities. Queer Africa, published in 2013 by MaThoko's Books and edited by Karen Martin and Makhosazana Zaba, is an eye-catching collection of 18 stories that imagine queer Africa in a way certain to raise consciousness and sensitivity to alternate ways of being. Davina Owombre, Sello Duicker, Dolar Vasani, Wame Molephe and Monica Arac de Nyeko are just some of the authors in this collection. Awarded the Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT anthology in 2014, these iconic tales are significant milestones of sexual affirmation and emancipation in African societies that are socialised in heterosexual values and which ridicule and shame the idea of difference and ambiguity. Queer is an umbrella term that refers to all LGBTIQ people.It is a political statement as well as a sexual orientation, which advocates breaking binary thinking and seeing both sexual orientation and gender identity as potentially fluid. The stories in Queer Africa (2013) dramatise the discursive nature of this term. Five of the narratives have been selected for critical analysis here; each utilises diverse personas to reimagine queer experience as a contested terrain that challenges a reductive and binary construction of identities.
Imbizo, 2024
This article explores the resistance exhibited by queer characters against homophobic legislation and religious norms within the framework of gender performativity in selected short stories from Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis focuses on narratives from diverse regions, including Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” and “In the Best Interests of the Child” (Malawi), Monica Arac de Nyeko’s “Jambula Tree” (Uganda), Davina Owombre’s “Pelican Driver” (Nigeria), Emil Rorke’s “Poisoned Grief” (Zimbabwe), and Dolar Vasani’s “All Covered Up” (Tanzania). The article argues that the queer protagonists featured in the chosen short stories actively resist societal pressures towards compulsory sexuality and assigned gender roles. Within the sociopolitical contexts of the characters, laws and religious doctrines prescribe and enforce a heteronormative framework that homosexual characters are compelled to adhere to. The theoretical framework guiding this analysis draws from Judith Butler’s gender performativity, which challenges the assumption of a direct alignment between biological sex and gender identity. According to Butler, being biologically male or female does not dictate one’s gender identity, and the same principle applies to sexuality. The article examines how heteronormative laws and homophobic religious doctrines contribute to the construction of mandatory sexuality and assigned gender roles. Through the lens of characterisation, the article analyses how queer characters in the selected stories actively challenge and denounce the homophobia perpetuated by these legal and religious structures. This exploration sheds light on the nuanced ways in which gender performativity theory manifests in the lived experiences and narratives of queer individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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.
Frontiers and pioneers in (the study of) queer experiences in Africa Introduction
Africa, 2021
This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term 'pioneer' for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theoriza-tion based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions-as it always has-only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication , a Euro-American centre. 'Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as "data" or "evidence," not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies' (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in 'suave', for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to 'define' African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers. Inspired by Francis Nyamnjoh's and Stella Nyanzi's work, we argue that studying the quotidian is a critical first step. Even as we follow up on an existing body of literature on queer sexualities in African societies, this literature shows how the investigation of the everyday is easily subsumed by other concerns; our aim is thus to centre people's practices and experiences as a focal axis of theorizing. Rachel Spronk is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In her work on gender, sexuality and the middle classes she combines the ethno-graphic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. Email: R.Spronk@uva.nl S. N. Nyeck is a visiting scholar at the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory School of Law and a research associate with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Mandela University.
Queer Africa: literature as art of resistance
Revista Letras Raras, 2022
The discussion about literature as a fictional space of resistance in contexts of oppression in life is rich. Relatedly, we find literary works by African authors that represent queer bodies in fictional spaces in which, in life, are marked by homophobia and/or the criminalization of homosexuality. This article therefore aims to thematically present Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction and Queer Africa 2: New Stories. To this end, we discussed the context of criminalization of homosexuality in the authors’ birth countries and brought to the debate African and Africanist scholars who discuss how the theologization and politicization of the religious discourse, according to which queer people are sinful and deprived of the grace of God, and the discourse of the tradition, according to which homosexuality is a product of the West and, therefore, un-African, seek the permanence of the status quo in these countries. During the thematic analysis of the short stories and the analysis of “Pub 360” based on Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, we realized that the short story writers brought to the fictional world the representation of the conflicts experienced by characters who discover or live their sexuality in the midst of homophobic or criminalizing contexts and the love and passion of couples who live and explore their sexuality in their daily lives; that is, it is the human and humanizing experiences of queer bodies represented in the short stories that make these collections an art of resistance not only for the representation they make, but for their very existence.
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.
Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story
2021
In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstru...
African Sexual Politics: A Pan-African Lesbian Perspective
Sex Politics: Trends & Tensions In the 21st Century – Contextual Undercurrents, 2019
"This chapter in Volume 2 of Sex Politics is written by Varyanne Sika and Awino Okech, on behalf of the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL). The chapter begins with a re-capturing of an African Queer Manifesto, written in 2011 that develops a sharp critique of neo-colonial categories of identity and power, and ends by making explicit the position on sexual politics articulated by CAL. This standpoint squarely places struggles for sexuality rights within a Pan Africanist frame of self-determination in sexual, social, economic and political terms. This chapter also offers a concise and rich overview of African feminist writing on sexuality and identity that goes beyond social science bibliography to also give visibility to literature (poetry as well as fiction). This shows how contemporary African feminisms, while investing in theory and ground-level politics, are also engaged in exploring and valuing joy and pleasure as expressions of queer livelihoods and resistance. The chapter pushes further the critique of global LGBTI politics framed on the basis of identity and the biases that it implies. The chapter also scrutinizes how the insistent Western gaze on what is described as African homophobia provides North American and European LGBT subjects with an ideational platform to praise “their own emancipation against the foil of the subaltern other”. Analyses in this chapter also shows how the obsessive attention to violations of the human rights of LGBTI persons in Africa – in the Western media, but also in the discourse of international organizations –contributes to erase positive legal and policy gains achieved in recent years and, most principally, undercuts the agency of African queers in resisting various forms of oppression. In respect to organizing, the authors address the always difficult question of how funding can be de-politicizing and call for an intersectional politics on gender and sexuality that does not leave aside the economic and social dimensions of queer livelihoods." - Editors' note by Sonia Corrêa & Richard Parker