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.