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Paper short abstract:

Considering the erotic a powerful human resource (Lorde 1984), this paper engages the critical agency of same-sex loving women in postcolonial Ghana who claim knowledge and erotic "enjoyment," while using kinship terms to relate to each other, thereby forging new forms of relatedness.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years southern Ghana has seen an emergence of subcultures that organize around notions of gay modernity. With the HIV/AIDS pandemic playing a major role in carving out new identities, and paralleled by an increase in anti-gay rhetorics, these sites reflect the needs of men, but have only attracted few women who love women. Drawing on my own ethnographic data, the proposed paper explores the ways in which working-class women in postcolonial Ghana inhabit and conceptualize same-sex passions beyond the language of lesbian identity.

Especially women who understand the girlfriendships they engaged in during puberty as an integral part of their (sexual) coming of age, depict their adult preference for female lovers as an ongoing choice and claim the significance of intimate pleasure. This sense of choosing pleasure belies any neat categorical distinction between "practice" and "identity." Rather, their emphasis on sensual knowledge and "enjoyment" suggests a belonging to themselves that echoes Audre Lorde's vision of the "erotic as power," that thrives on "the joys, which we know ourselves capable of" (1984). Lorde's holistic understanding of knowledge and "erotic subjectivity" (Allen 2011) is powerful not least in its capacity to bridge the analytical gap between gender and sexuality. Engaging same-sex eroticism as powerful human resource, this paper seeks to grasp the everyday practices and the critical agency of "knowing women" who use kinship terms to relate to each other, thereby forging new forms of relatedness.