Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a longitudinal appraisal of Nollywood’s engagement with characterizations of sexuality, specifically its altering perceptions of homosexuality through a reading of three Nigerian films.

Paper long abstract:

Nigeria is one of the remaining countries in the world that still criminalizes same-sex relations, probably due to its deep religious affiliations. This posture plays a significant role in shaping public opinion and cultural reflections on homosexuality and LGBTQ+ identities in the country, with attendant social stigma and discrimination. Drawing from this socio-cultural reality, Nollywood, Nigeria’s renowned film industry, has created LGBTQ+ depictions with varying ranges of villainy since its inception in the 1990s, and more recently, more positive attributes. Scholars have paid little or no attention to the different characterizations of LGBTQ+ persons in Nollywood and this gap is what this essay seeks to fill. To do this, the essay derives its primary data from a longitudinal survey and comparative analyses of three films, Glamour Girls (1994), Men in Love (2010), and Ife (2020), produced individually in each of the three decades of the industry’s existence, to show the altering perceptions of queer representations in Nollywood. This essay thus provides insights into how attitudes towards homosexuality have evolved in Nigerian society, and how Nollywood reflects these changes.

Paper short abstract:

African popular arts often portray queerness as impossible in rural spaces. By framing the city as violent and homophobic, the Kenyan film, I am Samuel, reimagines the intersection of sexuality, space and belonging. It offers an alternate futurity of understanding (queer) African sexualities.

Paper long abstract:

Queer sexualities are often imagined in African literary texts and films as being possibly only within urban spaces. Rural spaces are deemed too conservative and traditionalist and thus incompatible with the expression and performance of queerness. The Kenyan film I am Samuel (2020) directed by Peter Murimi offers a different imagining of queer sexuality. Not only does the film transgress and suspend linear temporality, but it also challenges the idea that queer embodiment and performance is not impossible in rural areas. In fact, I am Samuel shows how the urban space is dangerous for individuals identifying as queer. The city is a space of lurking violence and considerable unbelonging. The rural area in which the parents of Samuel, the protagonist, live, which is supposed to embody very traditional and conservative cultural values and practices ultimately turns out to be the space in which the protagonist is freest to be queer. The film challenges the idea that queer bodies can only belong to, or find freedom in, urban spaces. In so doing, the film registers and imagines a different futurity for understanding queer sexualities in Africa. The film gestures towards the possibility for change and for queer bodies to forge a place for themselves, even in contexts that are deemed traditionalist and conservative.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the various depictions and discussions about desire across racial boundaries that are carried out in the early 20th-century South African novel Margaret Harding (1911) by Perceval Gibbon.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most explosive cultural and social debates in South Africa in the 1920s was the discussion about interracial sexual relationships triggered by the publication of William Plomer’s novel Turbott Wolfe (1925) which centred a relationship between a white man and a black woman. However, already fourteen years earlier Perceval Gibbon published the novel Margaret Harding (Flower o’ the Peach) which also portrayed interracial desire. This presentation will focus on the different ways that Margaret Harding depicts desire across racial boundaries, varying from opaque depictions of homoerotically-inflected gazes between men to the novel’s central friendship between a white woman and a black man which teeters on the edge of becoming a love affair. Prompted by the novel’s own engagement with early 20th-century thought on race and desire, the literary close reading will be considered in relation to this context while also drawing on 21st-century South African theory on the topic, primarily Zimitri Erasmus’s Race Otherwise (2017). What can reading a hundred year old text tell us about race and racial conviviality in South Africa today?

Paper short abstract:

Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater situates gender nonconformity within an Igbo framework that denies the universality of Western biomedical perspectives. Emezi’s creative use of Igbo cosmology circumvents colonising discourses and offers a provocative representation of gender beyond the binary.

Paper long abstract:

Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical novel Freshwater positions its gender nonconforming protagonist the Ada as an ọgbanje, or repeatedly reincarnated spirit child. In this paper I argue that Freshwater foregrounds elements of Igbo ontology as a way of imagining transgender identities which draw from historically liberal conceptions of gender and sexuality in Africa. The novel’s Igbo-centric figuration offers the Ada an empowering alternative to the Western biomedical discourses that typically pathologize transgender and gender nonconforming people. I posit that this move echoes Toyin Falola’s call for pluriversalism, or multiple universalisms which resist assumptions of universal Western experience.

However, I also acknowledge that Freshwater is not without its critics. Despite its provocative possibilities, Emezi’s novel is not always well-received, particularly within parts of the Igbo academic community. Some critics refuse Emezi’s representation of ọgbanje, arguing that their novel undermines the credibility of Igbo traditions. While these criticisms may be justified, I posit that such critiques possibly insist on an essentialism that Emezi actively seeks to avoid. I argue that Emezi purposefully claims and creatively refashions the ọgbanje concept to demonstrate that Igbo and other African ontologies are mobile, flexible and adaptable. By refiguring the typically malignant ọgbanje as an empowering identity, Freshwater imagines a tentatively hopeful, open-ended future for the Ada. Thus while Emezi’s use of ọgbanje may pose some problems for readers, it nonetheless gestures toward broad gender nonconforming horizons rooted in African ontologies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines the multiple and contrasting ways in which same-sex sexuality is constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed in Africa and the author argues that there are evidences that there is a future of greater tolerance and inclusion for same-sex sexuality in Africa.

Paper long abstract:

There are contestations around homosexuality, and more broadly African sexuality in the extant literature. Gays and lesbians (sexual minorities) are more vulnerable to harassment, marginalization and discrimination in most African contexts where gender roles are rigidly masculinized and feminized. There is a general stigmatizing attitude and various ramifications of violence towards them. However, contemporary realities have shown that some African countries are gradually shifting grounds by decriminalizing same-sex activities and allowing sexual minorities some space to operate. This paper critically examines the multiple and contrasting ways in which same-sex sexuality is constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed in Africa. We consider Western intervention, and global politicization of homosexuality as factors that are ameliorating deep systemic injustice against sexual minorities in Africa. There are evidences that there is a future of greater tolerance and inclusion for same-sex sexuality in Africa.

Keywords: Africa; Gay; Lesbians; Sexuality; Sexual Rights

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s emerging voice in literary and feminist scenes and proposes an analysis of her story collection The Sex Lives of African Women (2021), discussing sexual freedom, afroqueerness and lesbianism as "subversive" practices of contestation and resistance.

Paper long abstract:

In her anthology, The Sex Lives of African Women (2021), Ghanaian writer and blogger Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah chronicles thirty-two stories of Black African and Afro-descendant women of different ages and sexual orientations to openly discuss queer and identity issues, family and religious dynamics, sexual freedom and pleasure, and abuses and resistance against heteropatriarchal structures.

In this paper, I will first examine Sekyiamah’s emerging voice in literary and feminist scenes. Sekyiamah is a feminist, writer, storyteller, blogger, journalist, Director of Communications at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), and a member of the Black Feminism Forum Working Group. Inspired by feminists such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Maya Angelou, and Pregs Govender, Sekyiamah uses social media and her blog to support the rights of straight, lesbian, bisexual and transgender African women.

Second, I will propose an analysis of her story collection. I will draw on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “willfulness” (2014; 2017) to examine women’s agency while affirming their “dissenting” identities and facing the restrictions they are exposed to in environments still reluctant to accept alternative gender and sexual manifestations. I will discuss afroqueerness and lesbianism as "subversive" practices of contestation and resistance against heteronormativity and gender oppression (Zabus 2013; Ossome 2013) and “anti-colonial tools” against imperialist power structures and patriarchal opposition in Africa and across the diaspora.