Paper short abstract:

Current discourses on 'homosexuality' in Cameroon relate in unexpected ways to gender stereotypes implying different roles attributed to one and the same person. Thus 'homosexuality' seems to become an empty signifier. Is this a reason why it becomes such an unsettling notion creating a moral panic?

Paper long abstract:

In the current discourse on homosexuality in Cameroun the linking of alternative forms of sex to gender differences follows a standard pattern. The young men that are arrested on accusations of same-sex practices are suspected of feminine behavior and the players of the female soccer team are stereotyped as lesbian tomboys. However, there is also another discourse in which 'the' homosexual is depicted as a supreme phallocrat - 'un Grand', subjecting young boys to anal penetration. This discourse centers on Dr. Aujoulat, a French doctor who played a crucial role in the decolonization of Cameroon in the 1950s and who is, especially since 2000, regularly accused of having corrupted the new Cameroonian elite by submitting them to such homosexuals practices. Striking is the combination of quite different roles attributed to such 'homosexuals': Ahidjo, the country's first President is depicted in recent cartoons as a crying baby in diapers and as an inveterate penetrator, sodomitizing his courtiers; same for his successor, Biya. Striking is that local ideas on same-sex practices as a 'medecine of wealth' are similarly polyvalent about the exact role attributed to such lovers. Thus, the notion of 'homosexuality,' now very current in the country, risks to become an empty signifier. Is it because of this that the term has acquired such an unsettling impact?

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I subject a collection of op-eds that discusses homosexuality in leading Ugandan newspapers to textual and content analysis to uncover the image of gay subjectivity that has emerged in the last 10 years.

Paper long abstract:

Leading scholars of media and public discourses such as Nancy Frazer (1992) and Michael Warner (2002) have variously contested the idea that the media is a disinterested and dispassionate participant in public debates. They argue that the media cannot be neutral when the issue under debate is about polarising and explosive subjects such as sexuality, race, and gender because media gatekeepers such as editors, commentators and columnists often coalescence around an issue in a highly subjective manner to buttress the interlocutor's biases. I apply Frazer's and Warner's point that public discourses in the media are engendered to particular ideological standpoints and that institutions like the media mobilise logic, reason, intellect, and experience to advance particular points of view in respect to a topical issue to the framing of homosexuality in Ugandan media in the last decade. Hypothesising that op-ed sections of the Ugandan newspapers are platforms at which different public intellectuals debate important issues in society such as the purported danger of homosexuality to Ugandan children and way of life, I subject a collection of op-eds that discusses homosexuality in leading Ugandan newspapers — Daily Monitor, The Observer and The Independent — to textual and content analysis of the image of gay subjectivity that has emerged from these analyses since 2009 when homosexuality morphed into a topical issue in the country. I argue that the image of homosexuals that are constructed and circulated as either pitiable pariahs or pompous perverts fails in accurately delineating who is a Ugandan homosexual.

Paper short abstract:

In Kenya, some worry that a growing demand for anal sex leads to a rising demand for adult diapers. Activists use the image of the "citizen in diapers" to mock perverse subjects. I argue that diapers are queer objects that complicate presumptions of sexuality as a distinct ontological domain.

Paper long abstract:

In Kenyan popular culture, diapers now depict the failures of citizenship. In Malindi, a police commissioner claims that "boys engaging in sexual activities with male tourists are buying pampers because they can no longer hold their stool." A journalist explains: "The diaper industry continues to flourish… all thanks to the booming tourism of… perverts." Sex workers, NGO workers, and citizens worry that a growing demand for anal sex on the night market leads to a rising demand for adult diapers. Meanwhile, activists use the image of the "citizen in diapers" to mock the perverse and the corrupt. Congealing anxieties over the material and moral integrity of bodies and polities, diapers announce citizenship trouble. As civil society groups, churches, NGOs, and activists worry about teen sexuality, pornography, prostitution, and homosexuality, a certain ethos of rescue crystalizes: myriad attempts to rehabilitate the "normative" intimacies of citizenship. Originating in the national public, this rescue ethos inflects everyday life in unexpected ways. Talk about diapers is one example. Understanding such talk means rethinking topographies of normativity and citizenship. I argue that "queer objects," such as diapers, trouble presumptions of sexuality as a distinct ontological domain. Instead, such objects constitute what Freud calls the subject's "Other scene," the social unconscious of citizen sexuality which is both disavowed as a condition for the subject's formation yet also constitutive of the subject. I show how projects invested in rescuing normative intimacies build on and borrow from the semiotics and sentiments of queer objects.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation is based on the initial findings of a doctoral research project that seeks to investigate how mobility - including migration and other forms of movement - influence gendered sexualities in sex work, within southern Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on the initial findings of a doctoral research project that seeks to investigate how mobility - including migration and other forms of movement - influence gendered sexualities in sex work, within southern Africa. Literature suggests that when sex work intersects with any form of mobility, a conducive environment (space) for gender and sexual exploration manifests. I am curious as to what extent this nexus informs the sexual citizenship of people who move to sell sex (migrant sex workers), or sell sex on the move (mobile/transient sex workers). The purpose of this study is to unearth new knowledge, understandings and socio-political meanings that can be deduced from the intersections of sex work, mobility and gendered sexualities - specifically as they pertain to notions of citizenship. The study endeavours to unpack what this might mean for those whose gendered sexualities are performed fluidly across the spectrum - those who tend to be unrecognisable to the nation-state, but in cases where they are 'seen', are often (mis)identified as 'sexual deviants', or (at best) 'victims'. This analysis will be in the form of queering sex work and mobility. In so doing, I aim to explore how (sexual) economies - coupled with movement - inform the governance of (sexual) citizenships, and most importantly, to what socio-political ends.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the sidelining of the queer body interacts with the mainstreaming of queer counter discursive practice in Nigeria. It explores the paradoxical emergence of textual trends from non-normative sexual practice and the attendant ambiguities of such trends.

Paper long abstract:

Texts have, over time, become tools for sexual minorities in Nigeria, like in many other parts of the world, to transgress normativity. But are such texts more inherently multilayered than their explicit 'transgressiveness'? What are the factors responsible when they become mainstream in spite of their apparent non-normative stances? And how can we critically trouble the narrative of their non-normativity? Examining two different instances of the mainstreaming of queer textual production, this paper attempts to identify the subtle interactions between centre and periphery in queer discourse in Nigeria. In the first instance, I examine She called me Woman (2018), a lesbian anthology that has enjoyed a great deal of publicity in the Nigerian space in spite of its queer leanings. I intend here to reveal the normative economic undertones that mark its production and to show how these contribute to (or even determine) its mainstreaming. The second instance draws on a defensive statement ('They didn't caught me') by a young Nigerian man who was arrested in September 2018 for being allegedly gay; and that became viral on social media and popularly appropriated in urban youth slang. I examine how the subject's sexual ambiguity, as opposed to his outright queerness, played a significant role in the acceptance and popularizing of his text. This paper, thus, not only explores the economic formation and emergence of queer counter discourse, but also the sexually normative functionality that marks -and perhaps, allows- the centrality of such texts.

Key Words:

Queer Texts, Nigeria, Economy, Transgression, Normativity

Paper short abstract:

ased on fieldwork in Swakopmund, Namibia, this paper explores male friendships in the context of growing, and generally accepted, LGBT+ movements across Namibia. How does friendship relate to and differ from LGBT+ identities? Where must the 'queer' be situated, if at all?

Paper long abstract:

In Swakopmund, a small coastal city in the west of Namibia, notions of friendship sit sometimes uncomfortably close to conceptions of homosexuality; 'friendship' as a particular kind of intimate relationship between men involves companionship, mutual support and sex. Situated outside of marriage, yet usually occurring with the consent of wives and often more intimate than marital bonds, the homoerotic and companionate nature of friendship in Swakopmund is perhaps undeniable.

Despite being kept secret (or played down) from most others outside of the family, in Swakopmund this kind of relationship between men was also normalised not simply by its prevalence but most pertinently by its desirability; even those not involved in friendships expressed a longing for the kind of companionship that came with having a friend. Being 'gay' or 'queer', however, was a label rejected by men involved in these camaraderies, with LGBT+ movements often being located 'somewhere else', both geographically and in terms of personal identification. Yet Namibia is one of the few African countries in which LGBT+ movements receive support from government, despite sexual activity being technically illegal under an antiquated and never-used anti-sodomy law - in Namibia it is, more-or-less, 'OK to be gay'.

Based on two years' fieldwork in Swakopmund, this presentation addresses two key points. Firstly - given the quotidian - and intimate - nature of MSM relationships, how do friendships relate to LGBT+ identities? Secondly, considering the normalisation of both LGBT+ identities and male friendships, how must the 'queer' be situated in Swakopmund?

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on accounts from young urban women and men in Zimbabwe about the practice of labia elongation in relation to sexual norms to demonstrate the instability of "queerness" and argues this concept needs to be theorized imaginatively beyond the lenses of same sex expression.

Paper long abstract:

The hegemonic representation of Queer studies is that which frames this field as being synonymous with or limited to LGBTI studies or non-normative sexual orientation in general. African feminists such as Nyanzi (2014) propose the theorizing of queerness within and beyond LGBTI. Drawing on this invitation, this paper focuses on diverse accounts from young urban women and men in Zimbabwe about the practice of labia elongation. It examines the different and complex connections participants make between this gendered practice and issues of female (sexual) desire and pleasure, as well as notions of "completeness" and "incompleteness" (read as queer). While these issues to a large extent reflect sexual and gendered norms that are hetero-patriarchal in nature, they are nonetheless unstable. In particular, the paper demonstrates the subversion, contestations, and resistance of these norms, for example, by women who were framed as "incomplete" or "queer" for not undergoing labia elongation, and those who expressed concern over the framing of this practice exclusively around male sexual desire and pleasure. Further, the paper argues that norms need not be seen only as suppressive forces, but rather also as productive forces drawing from a Post-structuralist sense. It attempts to highlight how the notion of "queerness" or "abnormality" is not only contextual and unstable, but is in constant reconfiguration and thus needs to be theorized imaginatively beyond the lenses of same sex expression.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork amongst self-identified "effeminate" fioto men and their so-called "normal" boyfriends and potential partners in urban DR Congo, this paper reveals the limitations of understanding the relation between sexual norms and transgression in merely oppositional terms.

Paper long abstract:

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. From such a perspective, transgression implicitly or explicitly becomes an act of resistance against the norm. This is particularly clear in dominant strands of Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has - paradoxically - become a field-defining norm. Such strong anti-normativity, however, often becomes a liability when trying to do justice to actually existing queer dynamics and potentials, especially - but not only - in past and present African realities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork amongst self-identified "effeminate" fioto men and their so-called "normal" boyfriends and potential partners in urban DR Congo, this paper reveals the limitations of understanding the relation between sexual and gender "norms" and "transgression" in merely oppositional terms. Indeed, fioto men and boys do not position themselves in opposition to the norm, but rather in relations of playful complicity. Looking at practices of seduction and provocation between embodied subjects that are themselves produced by such erotic processes, this paper shows how and why "norms" are always already queerer than they might seem. Rather than "opposing" a supposedly Queer norm from an African(ist) margin, it mirrors fioto strategies of seduction and provocation in order to trigger into being new possibilities that are already present in recent debates between anti-normative and anti-anti-normative positions in Queer Theory.