Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyses queer futurity, mysticism and the subject of post-apartheid freedom in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams through a Lacanian reading of the novel’s ekphrastic representation, fraternity and its critique of the libidinal and political economies of Cape Town.

Paper long abstract:

There is by now an established current in the critical reception of K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), that focuses on the novel’s representation of queer futurity and critique of the hegemonic and heteronormative order of post-apartheid (as well as global) social relations. What remains missing in this latter commentary on the novel is a critical appreciation for the ways in which the problematic of futurity needs to be considered not only as a discrete question of the temporality and spatiality of post-apartheid freedom. That is, through the gaze of queer mysticism, the novel imagines queer futurity at the intersection of the libidinal, spatial and political economies of Cape Town. In a Lacanian reading of the novel’s appropriation of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for the constitution of queer fraternity, and its critique of the economies of male prostitution in the city, the essay argues that the mystic and aesthetic reproduction of the subject of post-apartheid freedom evinced by the novel, should not be uncritically celebrated as sufficient critique of the quiet violence of the deferred dream of liberation.

Paper short abstract:

The Kewpie Collection, featuring the gays and girls of District Six (1950-1990), offers a crucial yet unexplored practice of grief that is at odds with the South African nationalist, ‘gay rights’ impulse that shaped its 1990s archivalisation: a practice that seeks to enable expansive, queer futures.

Paper long abstract:

As the question of so-called gay rights emerged as an element of South African public culture, amid efforts to ensure the passage of the equality clause in the 1996 Constitution, the continent’s first Gay and Lesbian Archives, newly-established in Johannesburg, acquired 600 photographs and three interviews featuring their collector, Kewpie. These materials depict self-described gays and girls living in Cape Town’s District Six from 1950-1990. Classified 'Coloured' under apartheid, the girls had been among 60,000 forcibly removed from the District by the Nationalist government.

While framing the Kewpie Collection’s 1990s archivalisation as an effort to establish historical precedent for a contemporary political agenda, this paper suggests that Kewpie’s use of gay exceeds the discourses of sexuality in which those politics invested. Indeed, Kewpie curtails her interviewers’ rhetoric of political progress through activism. Across interviews, Kewpie resists ideological co-option by declining to co-operate with her archivists’ optimistically future-oriented projects and by embedding in her testimony a disruptive practice of grief and concomitant dissonant temporalities.

Accommodating grief for losses erased from the public sphere, and marking the cost of working to sustain what she terms ‘gay life’ while living in proximity to death, Kewpie’s melancholic practice insists on bringing with those failed – those made ‘late’ – by contemporary nationalist political movements. This paper highlights the as-yet-unexplored artistic and cultural significance of this practice, which seeks to make presently devalued forms of life more possible than their erasure allows and, ultimately, to materialise the expansive futures that Kewpie’s photographs help us imagine.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the male performance of female identity on digital platforms in Kenya. We read the performances as lenses through which to assess the said re-presentation of gender identity in a sense that resonates with post-structural perspectives on gender identification.

Paper long abstract:

One of the emergent popular cultures in Kenya in the age of digital technologies has been the experimental forms of social identification that are staged on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Dina Ligaga (2012) has referred to these as virtual expressions and sees them as creative productions that are possible because of the internet as an alternative space where popular cultures are produced and circulated, and she significantly argues that one needs to explore the context in which such cultures are produced. We follow up on this argument by problematizing the concepts of ‘context’ and ‘alternative space’ that we consider to have unique significance to the drag queen performance in Kenya. We use context in terms of the digital cultures of celebrity as well as the social construction and policing of gender identity in Kenya. It is in this sense that we locate the drag queen performance as located at the interface between the social media cultures of social identity approval that use the grammar of comments and likes as well as the politics of gender identity as situated social discourse. We use relevant elements of digital research methodology as well as ethnography to collect and process data, which is mainly drawn from TikTok, Facebook and YouTube. We explore the work of notable artists across the said platforms but narrow down to three for closer thematic analysis. These are Kinuthia, Flaqoraz, Shaniqua, and Senge Helena. We forge a theoretical tool out of relevant strands of camp aesthetics, gender theory, and popular culture. In the end, we aim to contribute to the developing discourse on the appropriation of the digital technologies in social transformation in this part of the world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the case of a Ghanian artist and activist, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT), who uses performance art as a thought-provoking tool to confront discrimination against queer people and imagine queer futures in Ghana, where LGBT rights are threatened by a recent bill.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the case of an artist and activist who fights for LGBT rights in Ghana. Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) uses performance art to confront discrimination against queer people, as a local and global issue. Homosexuality is already a crime in Ghana, but since 2021 there is a lively political debate around a bill that could make the situation much worse. The “Promotion of proper human sexual rights and Ghanaian family values” bill is going to criminalise anyone who is not fitting heteronormative standards. The Bill proposes strengthening prison sentences up to five years for same-sex relationship and ten years for activities of advocacy and support for LGBT rights. The combined influence of policy makers, journalists, and ultra-conservative Christian movement is creating an hostile environment for LGBT people that have less space to express their identities. Since activism is becoming a dangerous activity, queer activists are developing creative methods and strategies to communicate their messages. They aim to reframe the current narrative on LGBT people, deconstruct stereotypes and misconceptions, and build social agency for queer people, also using art as a thought-provoking tool. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach between anthropology and art, the paper investigates how art can play an active role for social justice and help to imagine queer futures in a country where LGBT rights are not recognized. In particular, it focuses on performance art, a practice not common in Africa, but effective in staging in public space politically and socially relevant topics.

Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic analysis of communities of queer women in Senegal, I show how queer kin formations create spaces for queer futures to materialise as women confront urban material precarity, growing homophobia and the challenges of living with family as a collective.

Paper long abstract:

In a context of rising homophobia, what forms does queerness take in Senegal? How do women oscillate between silence and speaking up, when building their queer futures? I use Diabate’s (2020) concept of naked agency to explore ethnographically how women question heteropatriarchy and social injustices from positions of vulnerability. Analysing women’s critical agency that is distinct and distant from queer activism and a growing visibility of feminist activism in the Senegalese public sphere, I demonstrate how leisure spaces emerge where women can play with gender- and kin conventions as a way to shape their futures. Central to understanding how these women’s naked agency takes shape, are their practices of kinship. Navigating the violence and possibilities that kinship produce (Bradway and Freeman 2022), women confront urban material precarity, growing homophobia and the challenges of living with family as a collective. In their collective attempts to create liveable lives for themselves, they develop, transmit and reveal a savoir-vivre in the interstices between loud anti-queer debates on the one hand and discretion and indirection on the other hand. Their savoir-vivre is built upon elusiveness and transience rather than fixed identities, with particular queer but ever-changing linguistic praxis; flexible housing arrangements and multiple spaces and networks to tap into. The result is a challenge to the heteropatriarchal state by making queerness visible in a playful, collaborative, non-identitarian way.

Paper short abstract:

I analyze the recurrence of hegemonic Mozambican elite discourse alleging a national tolerance of homosexuality. I argue this discourse is reminiscent of the Lusotropicalist myth, now transformed into a new kind of homonationalism and that it reverberates in the current LGBT activism in Mozambique.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the role of colonial heritage and current geopolitical relations in the case of contemporary Mozambican LGBT activism; and what kind of future these queer activists envision from their place in history. As the result of ethnographic research with the local LGBT community, I deal with a hegemonic elite discourse alleging tolerance toward homosexuality in this country. I analyze the logic of this discourse among local LGBT activists, journalists, politicians, and scholars. In the face of a long Anglo-Saxon hegemony and a colonial-inherited self-perception as a weak state, the Mozambican elite discourse of national tolerance toward homosexuality is reminiscent of the Lusotropicalist myth, now transformed into a Global Southern homonationalism; and it explicitly reverberates in the current political strategies of Mozambican LGBT activism. For example, as they privilege "raising awareness" in society instead of "rights talk." If the "linear time of modernity and progress continues to inform ideals of respectability and ideologies of governance" for Mozambican activists, they do so by comparing themselves with other African LGBT activism approaches. Thus, new civilizational rhetoric and Global Southern queer/nationalist utopias are diacritically created and updated.

Paper short abstract:

How may ethnography help us grasp queer future-making practices and activate their critical possibilities in a time when the rhythms of respectability have generally become ‘queer’ – unruly or out of line – and the state promises the securitization of intimacy and morality?

Paper long abstract:

On 17 May 2017, the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, the Goethe Institute in Nairobi displayed the work of six Kenyan artists in an exhibit provocatively named “To Revolutionary Type Love: A Celebration of Queer Love.” At the forefront of the exhibit was a remarkable collection of twenty-two kanga fabrics that called for affects and attachments that are more expansive and inclusive, more accepting of queerness. Turning a salient cultural object long wedded to nationalist imaginaries of tradition and ‘African morality’ into a medium of queer activism, artist Kawira Mwirichia, I suggest, set out to imagine a different sort of future.

Departing from the political art of Kenyan Kawira Mwirichia, in this chapter I explore how anthropologists may grasp queer future making practices, past and present and, through ethnography, activate their critical and transformative possibilities. How do queer futures materialize amid (or against) rising homophobic rhetoric and violence, or growing investment in the national utopia? How can such futures be manifested in a contemporary political economy so desperately invested in rescuing heteropatriarchal normativities? I suggest that it is precisely with a generalized sense that the rhythms of the life course, value, and respectability have become ‘queer’ – in the sense of unruly or out of line – that a fetishistic overinvestment in the promises of the security state becomes saliently resonant with people’s everyday struggles and concerns.