Agenda: Empowering women for gender equity Sumptuous lives: Emancipatory narratives in selected stories from Queer Africa (2013 (original) (raw)

abstract 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.