African Queer Research Articles

Incredible, libidinal, strange: African queer studies and Tejumola Olaniyan’s legacies

This article gives an account of Tejumola Olaniyan’s under-appreciated role in supporting the emergence of the field of queer African literary studies, and provides a provisional historiography and bibliography of that field. The article then reads Olaniyan’s work, in particular Arrest The Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, through a queer lens. Olaniyan’s examination of the “strange” relationship between the African state, its rebels, and its subjects, across his archive, and his nuanced discussion of transgression and norm—“libidinal” and otherwise—offers rich intellectual potential for African queer studies, and queer studies at large.

African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation (S.N. Nyeck)

African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation (S.N. Nyeck)

‘Something else’?: international co-production, postcolonial crime fiction and the representation of sexual orientation in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency TV series

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is both a successful series of novels and a television series which ran for one series on the BBC in 2008. While the books have been criticised on a number of aspects, including its representation of Botswana, the television series has received very little academic attention at all. The television series was an international co-production between the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa, using a mix of American and South African actors in regular and recurring roles with British guest artists and production team despite being shot in Botswana. While the main features of the adaptation were primarily related to a reordering of vignettes from the books into the series, the television series added in a new character, the camp, gay hairdresser BK. At the time the series was airing, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in Botswana though that has since been changed. As such, this paper will discuss the addition of this liminal character into the series through close reading of the text and paratexts (including industrial context). Ultimately the paper will contextualise the addition with regard to both national and sexual identity and debates surrounding African queer identities.

Writing the polyphonic African queer future: reflections on Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

In reading Freshwater (2018), one cannot but confront the diversity of perspectives that Akwaeke Emezi deploys to usher their African queer protagonist into an African-oriented queer future. While there exists – or should exist – pluriversal notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, specific epistemologies produced by Eurocentric structures continue to govern these notions and drive liberational discourse. Drawing largely from Afro/Africanfuturism, Queer futurism, and cultural references drawn from African systems of thought, I argue that Emezi’s novel brings together modern technological intervention on the human body and Igbo cosmology to liberate the African queer body from Western dominant structures of knowledge and Africa’s cultural amnesia. I also argue that the futuristic perspectives deployed in Freshwater allows for the destabilizing of conventional knowledge at the level of language and imagery such that suppressed and new structures of consciousness are centered. This is shown through the emblematic figure of the deified African woman, the redemptive link between the female image and sacred python, the symbiosis between visual and non-visual components, and the polytheistic religious value of collaboration. I highlight, ultimately, that the intersection of technology and imagination for the goal of liberation, which critical futurism espouses, allows Emezi to regenerate the historiography of the Ogbanje without surrendering to the vocabulary of doom, misery and despair that frames their shortly lived human existence.

“We Are Claiming Space, We Are Visible!”: The Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand as a Space of Solidarity, 1980s–1990s

This article seeks to reintegrate the history of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) into southern African queer historiography, which has inadvertently sidelined the role of the organisation, ignoring the plight of GLOW’s activists, as well as many others, mostly black gays and lesbians. Through the use of archival material and interviews with former GLOW members, this article examines GLOW’s role in connecting the gay liberation struggle to the anti-apartheid struggle. The article interrogates GLOW’s role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, which helped align gay and lesbian rights with the broader idea of rights for all citizens at a time in South African history when being against rights for any group of people was deemed unacceptable. This article further examines the various schisms within GLOW that facilitated its eventual decline, but which also made the organisation multi-layered. These multiple aspects of GLOW were crucial in creating solidarity between gays and lesbians who were able to successfully fight for a Constitution that would protect the rights of non-heteronormative society.

Slow beauty: Refocusing Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid through a slow cinema lens

Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid is often read as a representation of South African queer realities and political progressiveness both during and since the dissolution of apartheid. Consequently, Hermanus’s contribution to the aesthetic of slowness in Skoonheid has gone largely unnoticed in the broader context of slow cinema. In this article, I examine how Hermanus, through the slow cinema conventions, urges the viewer to contemplate issues of crucial importance to human behaviour, thereby putting Skoonheid’s meditative qualities on display. Drawing on Ira Jaffe’s concept of expressive minimalism, Emre Çağlayan’s poetics of slow cinema, and Thomas Elsaesser’s observations on the virtues and demands of slow cinema, I analyse the narrative and aesthetic strategies deployed in Skoonheid within the purview of slow cinema and beyond a representation of queer sexuality. This analysis reveals that Skoonheid represents a mode of narrative-formal expressiveness distinct from, yet in dialogue with, slow cinema in its emphasis on contemplation. Principally, Hermanus finds a way to testify to some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary society through the film’s contemplative approach, which draws the viewer’s attention to the mystery and ambiguity of human experience. Skoonheid’s contemplative approach is informed by the film’s processes and experiences of alienation, incommunicability, and existentialism.

Storying Silenced Queer Narratives: Koleka Putuma’s re-membering and re-memorying of Queer Trauma in No Easter Sunday for Queers (2019)

Contemporary theatre in South Africa has a history of hegemonically framing narratives that prevalence cisheteronormative stories. These narratives exacerbate the already existing acts of violence resulting from systems that place queerness against the backdrop of marginality. Inquiries in queer histories, identities, and sexualities arouse questions of belongingness, emphasising perspectives and tensions that many queer people in South Africa grapple with due to inherited systems of silencing. This article applies a dialogic framework between Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) and Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) to explore the process of queering contemporary theatre and performers in South Africa. In this article, I explore how the work of Koleka Putuma, with specific reference to No Easter Sunday for Queers (2019), participates in the act of carving out a space of belongingness through embodied modes of re-membering and re-memorying through theatre and performance. The orientation of Putuma’s work guides this paper to ask: in what ways does South African queer theatre confront systems of power, violence, and dominance that silence queer people in contemporary South Africa?

Inxeba: Rethinking Dichotomies of Black Queer Visibilities

In this commentary, I read the recent film Inxeba alongside Andrew Tucker’s Queer Visibilities in order to ask questions about dichotomies, the space of the rural, and the framework of visibilities for thinking through African Queer urban practices. I suggest that a careful attention to the representational practices of a film like Inxeba requires us to think in more nuanced ways about Urban African sexualities.

Queering the Racial Other: Towards a Queer Africa

This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21st century African literature. Africa’s history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka’s portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka’s character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature - Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that ‘homosexuality is un-African’ on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works re-write the history of African queer people into the nation’s body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics.

Activism and Agency: Reflections on Emergent Queer Life Writing from Sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines how queer authors from sub-Saharan Africa use writing about their lives to expose the vulnerabilities that they face in their specific communities and how they try to elude the restrictions of homophobia in their activism. I read Siya Khumalo’s You Have to be Gay to Know God (2018) and Brian Pellot’s edited collection Hopes and Dreams that Sound Like Yours: Stories of Queer Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021) as autobiographical testimonies that explore means of queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa’s homophobic publics to challenge the sustenance of homophobia by dismantling its systematic ideological structures of power differentials in these societies. By championing activism, African queer writers engage in a process of creating new subjectivities that demand rights and visibility for their unthreatened presence on the continent. I argue that these life stories suggest that queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa ought to be multidimensional, inclusive, and cross-sectional to circumvent the prohibitions and restrictive forces of heteropatriarchy. The narratives also reveal that activism can become therapy and a source of resilience in the face of homophobia.

Negotiating queer voices: How five south African queer music educators negotiate their professional identity

Forced to navigate and negotiate their positionality and subjectivity, queer music educators confront unique challenges in heteronormative schooling environments. This minority group is often associated with the music industry. Still, upon entering an educational context, they navigate and negotiate their identity, specifically the tension between their queer selves and the heteronormative requirements of their teaching context. This article analyses the narratives of five queer music educators situated in a South African context. Being a queer music educator myself, I used a relational approach, the Listening Guide, to listen for the contrapuntal voices that come to the fore when my participants reflected on their professional identity negotiation as music educators. The participants developed various strategies to negotiate their professional identity, with some reporting on its negative impact on effective teaching. This article suggests that heteronormativity in music education should be challenged to allow for an inclusive and affirming space for queer music educators and students.

Emotional well-being of black African queer employees in the workplace

Orientation: Despite continuous sexual-orientation discrimination against sexual minorities in the workplace, many queer individuals have managed to create meaningful and happy lives inside and outside the organisation.Research purpose: To explore the work experiences of African queer employees and establish how their work experiences as sexual minorities have affected their emotional well-being within the work context.Motivation for the study: Most previous research studies focusing on the queer population have been conducted in Western countries. There is, therefore, scant empirical research focusing on African queer individuals. In addition, most previous studies explored queer individuals in general society from a pathological perspective. Because of the increased focus on the mental health crises in Africa and the detrimental impact, it may have on organisations; the current study explored the well-being of a marginalised group within the African work context.Research approach/design and method: This qualitative study included nine black queer participants working in Africa. Data were collected using snowball sampling.Main findings: The findings of the study show that the participants experienced both positive and negative affects. Although some reported to be satisfied with their work, others reported a neutral or a negative stance.Practical/managerial implications: More needs to be done to ensure that queer employees’ feel included and accepted in the workplace. Hostile working environments affect queer employees’ work experiences and well-being, and as such, management plays an indispensable role in creating a welcoming and supportive working environment.Contribution/value-add: The findings of the study contribute to the limited body of knowledge on the work experiences of black African queers. The findings should be of value to human resource practitioners and leaders who seek to create harmonious working environments in which all employees can excel and flourish.

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

Introduction

Introduction

Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives

ABSTRACT This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity in contemporary Africa. This addresses Western conceptions of queer politics and queer rights that operate on a largely secular, if not anti-religious and specifically anti-Islamic basis. Second, it renegotiates the marginality of North Africa, and especially the Maghreb, in queer African studies. This addresses problematic historic divisions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and acknowledges the political, cultural and intellectual unity of the continent. The article demonstrates that literary works make visible queer lived experiences on the continent. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s ideas of the ‘archiving of the unspeakable’ and Achille Mbembe’s concept of the ‘unarchivable’, this article adopts a ‘scavenger methodology’ to argue that literary works are important in creating an emergent queer African Islamic discourse as well as an alternative archive of African queer lived experiences.

Queering the black Atlantic: transgender spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s writing and visual art

ABSTRACT The last two decades have witnessed an emergence of African queer representations in literature and the arts that have been framed as interventions in cultural politics and as expressions of dissent. In this vein, I contend that it is necessary to consider queerness and diaspora together in order to rethink Gilroy's black Atlantic. Another important pursuit since the publication of The Black Atlantic (1993) has been reclaiming the place of Africa and its broad cultural production, which was largely overlooked in Gilroy's Westernized discussion of modernity. This article thus explores the growth of African queer studies in African literature and film, and goes on to focus on Nigerian-born transgender writer and visual artist, Akwaeke Emezi. Their experimental videos and photographs use Igbo traditions as part of their own expression of a gender non-binary African self in the diaspora. In their essay, ‘Transition' (2018a), Emezi challenges Western notions of gender through an African lens and reclaims their indigenous beliefs from a decolonial perspective. In defining what it means to be transgender, Emezi posits the notion that they might be an ogbanje, a spirit child found in some African pre-colonial cultures that does not conform to Western ideas of gender. Likewise, in the critically acclaimed debut novel Freshwater (2018b), the artist draws in part from their own life to tell the story of Ada, a young Igbo and Tamil woman haunted by the ogbanje, offering a poetic account of gender transition through the polyphonic voices of spirits that inhabit the protagonist. Emezi’s combination of personal experience and art makes visible multiple African, diasporic, and gender identities in the black Atlantic.

South African queer sons challenging the white father’s legacy: forging new Afrikaner male identities in Etienne Kallos’s Die Stropers (The Harvesters)

ABSTRACT The figure of the patriarchal white Afrikaner male was central to conceptualising and maintaining the system of apartheid in South Africa, and lingers in the imaginary of white identities in the country. Idealised white masculinity, embodied by the patriarch, is marked by strict gender roles and the rejection of same-sex sexualities, as these sexualities are seen as threatening to institutions like the heteronormative family and conservative Christianity. The 2018 South African film Die Stropers (The Harvesters) by Etienne Kallos represents queer sons in the rural farm setting. The film offers possibilities for disentangling white masculinities from heterosexist ideologies. Mirrors, mirroring and recognition/misrecognition are analysed as devices that represent the reproduction of ideology in the film, but queer sons are able to challenge these forms of mirroring and ultimately disrupt hegemonic masculinities that would stifle their identities, desires and forms of gender expression.

Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship: Reflections on African Diasporic Queer Imaginaries

This article interrogates how the bordering processes of both human bodies and geographical spaces impact on the citizenship rights of African queer subjects as represented in Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children (2013) and Queer Africa 2: New Stories (2017), edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin. I argue that, while exile is often represented as an alternative safe space for African queer subjects away from the continent’s heteropatriarchal authorities, narratives of suffering, alienation, and loss still dominate diasporic queer African literature. This suggests that exile may not be enabling enough in granting agency for the unthreatened performance of queer genders and sexualities since vulnerability from homophobic violence still manifests as a debilitating challenge beyond the borders of certain nation-states. The short stories analysed here establish that the denial of full citizenship rights to queer Africans does not begin at the level of their exclusion from some African geographical spaces, but rather, such exclusions begin with imagined geographies of the human body that create limits to acceptable notions of gender and sexual performance.

Queering the Queer

Due to the systemic reality of heteropatriarchy, queer bodies often struggle to find a place of belonging within the African context in general and faith spaces in particular. Even though there has been a shift towards a more inclusive theological discourse within the African Christian faith landscape, the bodies of African Izitabane are still predominantly viewed as a Western import and a threat to African culture and its traditions. Because of this, queer bodies continue to find themselves within hostile environments. This has contributed to queer people moving towards alternative spaces of worship and the development of the queer church in which all bodies are welcomed. Although queer bodies have created these alternative faith spaces to move away from the systems of heteropatriarchy that force them to conform to heteronormative standards within the church, a study conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, found that queer people often recreate these systems in their own spaces. The pervasive systemic nature of heteropatriarchy finds expression in the insistence on masculine bodies being placed in positions of authority and the exclusive recognition of relationships that conform to heteronormative standards. In the process of trying to escape the confines of a male centred heteropatriarchal African church, we argue that queer people have not succeeded in tapping into the full potential of the power of “queer” as a tool to disrupt and destabilise the pervasive system of heteropatriarchy. Our contri-bution aims to reflect on our collective queer journey, orientated towards understanding and interrogating the systemic realities underlying and informing the queer appropriation of patriarchy and heteronormativity in Afri-can queer faith spaces.

Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story

In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstructs the queer person as a human subject worth the dignity that they are often denied. In the article, I analyse a selection of six short stories from the collections Queer Africa 2: New Stories and Fairytales for Lost Children to demonstrate how these stories function as prosthesis for queer people in disabling societies.