Transcontinental Lives: Intersections of Homophobia and Xenophobia in South Africa (PhD Thesis) (original) (raw)
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Queer Africanness/African Queerness
Centre for Gender Studies Biennial Gender Research Conference, 2016
The fragile 'Rainbow Nation' myth shapes senses of life in South Africa. However, lived experiences are often violently at odds with legislature that enshrines equality. In this context, xenophobia and homophobia are prolific realities. Located at the junction of these prejudices, this presentation focuses on the liminal lives of 'queer African migrant men', where hopes for belonging transform into multifaceted unbelongings. Employing an intersectional necropolitical lens, the presentation explores fractured senses of community amongst workshop participants in South Africa, engaging with anxieties around the perceived 'unAfricanness of homosexuality'. Emphasising the failure of post-apartheid inclusivity, it argues that queer African migrants engage in processes of imagining themselves as members of transcontinental communities, resisting the death-infused bounds of the nation and 'home'. It shifts queerness away from familiar understandings and offers futures for connection, balancing shared experiences with a consideration of Africa as a site of border-fluid potentiality. Contrasting prejudice with everyday resistance, the presentation suggests an engagement with the challenges and promises of energized belonging forged through unbelonging.
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 AND TRANS AFRICAN MOBILITIES: Migration, Asylum and Diaspora
QUEER AND TRANS AFRICAN MOBILITIES Migration, Asylum and Diaspora, 2022
Recent years have seen increased scholarly and media interest in the cross-border movements of LGBT persons, particularly those seeking protection in the Global North . While this has helped focus attention on the plight of individuals fleeing homophobic or transphobic persecution, it has also reinvigorated racist tropes about the Global South. In the case of Africa, the expansion of anti-LGBT laws and the prevalence of hetero-patriarchal discourses are regularly cited as evidence of an inescapable savagery. The figure of the LGBT refugee – often portrayed as helplessly awaiting rescue – reinforces colonial notions about the continent and its peoples. Queer and Trans African Mobilities draws on diverse case studies from the length and breadth of Africa, offering the first in-depth investigation of LGBT migration on and from the continent. The collection provides new insights into the drivers and impacts of displacement linked to sexual orientation or gender identity and challenges notions about why LGBT Africans move, where they are going and what they experience along the way.
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.
South African LGBT(I) movement today: sexuality, health and migration (non)intersections (2012)
2012
The internship took place at the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand (August - December 2012) in frame of the project “Urban health, HIV and migration in Southern Africa: developing pro-poor policy responses to urban vulnerabilities” running by Dr.Joanna Vearey. As an intern/researcher I explored the non_intersections between sexuality and migration (with focus on LGBTI migrants) at national, local and community levels in South African cities taking Johannesburg as an example. The research provided an insight into the forms of urban vulnerabilities experienced by LGBTI migrants in the urban Gauteng.
Sexualities, 2021
This article presents findings from three arts-based studies conducted by the African Centre for Migration and Society, in partnerships with Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action and the Sisonke National Sex Worker Movement. Drawing on participant-created visual and narrative artefacts, the article offers insights into the complex ways in which queer migrants, refugees and asylum seekers living in South Africa negotiate their identities, resist oppression and confront stereotypes. It reveals the dynamic ways in which queer migrants, refugees and asylum seekers forge a sense of belonging in spite of concurrent vulnerabilities and structural discrimination. It also reflects on the benefits and limitations of using participatory arts-based research with marginalised groups.
Beyond the Mountain: Queer life in Africa's 'gay capital'
2019
Beyond The Mountain: Queer Life in “Africa’s Gay Capital” contributes to the body of knowledge on the lived experiences of lesbian gay bisexual transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) communities in Cape Town. The book provides insight on the plight of the LGBTQI community, which has entrenched itself unashamedly in Cape Town and challenges the stereotypes and prejudices suffered by these communities. This book, which promotes the rights and protection of LGTBQI community, is a collection that historically, metaphorically and physically spans the city of Cape Town. The chapters consists of narratives of lived experiences and academic discussions presented by both novice and experienced scholars. The imagery of beyond the mountain is a depiction of the lives of LGBTQI community and immovable negative perceptions the general public have to them and seeks to expose their world and the kinds of violence and abuse they are subjected to as well as unveiling the racial discrimination within these communities. The book revolves around four themes, namely, education, emancipation, protection, acceptance and integration of LGBTQI people in society.