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Paper short abstract:

How do silenced and erased subjectivities, processes, practices and peoples in present queer feminist representations of genders and sexualities in Africa feature in future envisioning, imaginations and scholarship? I analyse politics of knowledge creation, academic freedom and taboo breaking.

Paper long abstract:

How do silenced, invisibilised, erased and othered subjectivities, processes, practices and peoples in present queer feminist representations of genders and sexualities in Africa feature in future envisioning, imaginations and scholarship? In what ways can future academic scholarship and artistic creativity transcend current silences, invisibilisations and erasures within diverse bodies of knowledge produced about African genders and sexualities? To redress ongoing silencing and erasure, one must first delineate what/ who is excluded or left out. For each identified category of excluded form, one must subsequently answer the questions, why is it left out, where is it left out, who is leaving it out, how is it left out, and when is it left out? In this paper, I reflect on possibilities of practically transcending the silencing and erasures of othered aspects of genders and sexualities in Africa, by drawing from the politics of knowledge creation, limitations of academic freedom, lack of intersectional analyses and structural/ systemic factors that enhance tabooed domains. I think through and with the prisms of gender, generation, geography, class, ability, decriminalisation and digital democracy to enhance future representations of otherwise presently tabooed others.