Representing Gender and Sexual Dissidence in Southern Africa (original) (raw)
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Decolonizing the Law: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa
This chapter considers how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in Namibia and South Africa appropriate discourses of decolonization associated with African national liberation movements. I examine the legal, cultural, and political possibilities associated LGBT activists' framing of law reform as a decolonization project. LGBT activists identified laws governing gender and sexual nonconformity as in particular need of reform. Using data from daily ethnographic observation of LGBT movement organizations, in-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists, and newspaper articles about political homophobia, I elucidate how Namibian and South African LGBT activists conceptualize movement challenges to antigay laws as decolonization.
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American Ethnologist, 2008
In this article, I explore local productions of desire in Namibia by focusing on the engagement of young, working-class lesbians with human rights ideologies of sexual freedom. I discuss how various techniques deployed by a sexual minority-rights NGO allow youth to amplify and legitimize their embodied sense of sexual-gender difference. In my analysis of their self-mediated incitement, I regard desire as a moral practice; practices of self-determination and acts of resistance are generated and authenticated through repeated reflection on the internality of desire. My elaborations also emphasize class-related issues. I argue that struggles with class and gender inequality destabilize the very notion of "sexual identity" in ways that open up political and erotic possibilities between lesbians and other working-class women in Namibia, blurring the dividing lines of identity politics and of gender and class politics. [lesbian resistance, African sexuality, moral practice, desire, global queer identity, human rights]
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.
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
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.
Black Lesbian Identities in South Africa: Confronting a History of Denial
Journal of Gender and Religion in Africa, 2018
Much of the existing literature on South African black lesbian identities has focussed on the prejudice and victimisation that they endure as subjects of homophobia in the form of hate speech and hate crimes, most notably brutal murders and corrective rape. However, not much has been written about the creative ways that black lesbians are fighting against these injustices that are built upon the historical erasure and denial of their very existence in Africa. By outlining three 'denials' of African female same-sex intimacy namely: the imperial denial and subsequent apartheid policing of same-sex intimacy, the denial of female same-sex intimacy through proclaiming it as un-African, and the conceptual denial through the lens of Euro-American feminist lesbian discourse; this article aims to show how black lesbians in South Africa are finding ways to confront these denials. In particular, some aspects of lives and work of self-identified lesbian activist photographer Zanele Muholi and lesbian sangoma Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde will be analysed. Muholi and Nkabinde work hard to locate themselves within the public sphere, and engage in projects that aim to educate and build black lesbian communities, in an effort to encourage open dialogue of what it means to be an African lesbian. It can be argued that the voices of South African black lesbians are not only becoming more audible but also more nuanced, where imported notions of sexual identity are being questioned and adapted to their lived realities. Ultimately, this article aims to show how Muholi and Nkabinde provide examples of how reimaginings and negotiations of lesbian identities in (South) Africa are at once complex and essential, and this echoes Msibi's (2014) call for "greater voices from Africa in theorising sexuality-a terrain long ignored in African scholarship."