“You Cannot Be Like That Here”: Discourses of Sexual Identities among Urban Ghanaian Families

Abstract

While social discourses on gender and sexuality have become controversial in the African context, there is a tendency to overlook how the domestic space contrives and participates in such productions. This paper examines the domestic space to reveal the ways that it reproduces, sanctions, challenges, and disrupts discursive productions on sexuality. Drawing on interviews with selected urban Ghanaian families, the paper contributes to scholarship by arguing that the processuality of sexual scripts linked to moral scripts and cultural taboos produces complex tensions and ambivalences, with implications for cultural authenticity, power relations, fear-mongering, and social persecution. The analysis shows that sexuality, much like gender, is deeply discursive, processual, fluid, and shaped by culture and history, requiring scholars to engage in deep reflections on how discourses of sexuality inscribe themselves into the social and moral fabric to shape individual actions and behaviors. Taking evidence from urban Ghana, we argue that an important question remains eminent against the background of transformation for harnessing the potentials of the domestic space, which prescribes gender-specific behaviors and expectations between men and women across families.