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.