Serena Dankwa's work Knowing Women is a rare and precious gift that will undoubtedly reshape the contours of queer African studies. I hope the following can help transmit this gift of queer knowledge, which is itself the product of intimate processes of learning from and with Ghanaian working-class women who pass on erotic knowledge to their partners—and whose insights can now also touch us (albeit, unavoidably, in highly mediated textual form).This commentary first highlights the sheer originality of Dankwa's monograph, then identifies some of its thematic and analytic contributions to queer African(ist) scholarship. Next, it kickstarts a comparative exercise that foregrounds similarities and differences between the erotic culture of same-sex desiring women in postcolonial Ghana and the queer world of gender-dissident “fioto” men and their boyfriends in urban Congo. Finally, it crafts a new definition of “queerness” from erotic realities Dankwa depicts and which trouble its dominant understanding as antinormativity.• • •Queer African studies have grown rapidly over the last decade. And yet, while producing an increasingly diverse scholarship, the field is still dominated by work on queer men, usually from southern or eastern Africa, and often presented through a humanities or political theory lens. In this sense, Knowing Women stands out. It not only evokes the erotic world of women who desire women in Accra and a smaller (anonymized) Ghanaian town but also uses an empirical social science approach that renders lived realities in ways that keep close to people's experiences. Dankwa indeed presents a rich ethnography that approaches sensitive issues with care, nuance, and humility, without ever forgetting the inevitably fraught nature of her scholarly desire to know and represent.Knowing Women is therefore first and foremost an excellent piece of anthropology. Its detailed chapters do justice to the idiosyncrasies of individual life stories, while also identifying and following their common threads. Dankwa takes us through diverse terrains that turn out to be crucial for understanding the particularity of her interlocutors' lifeworlds. Without offering any easy shortcuts, she gives us a book where location, culture, history, kinship, and ethnicity matter deeply. In this sense, I particularly appreciate Dankwa's mobilization of a corpus of West Africanist anthropology that is often met with stringent criticism today (Melville J. Herskovits, Meyer Fortes, Françoise Héritier), but that contains surprisingly queer possibilities that are of great value alongside references to African feminism (Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Ifi Amadiume, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí), Euro-American queer theory (Judith Butler, Ann Cvetkovich, Jack Halberstam), and queer African scholarship (Keguro Macharia, Zethu Matebeni, Stella Nyanzi).Because of her ethnographic allegiances, Dankwa is also forced to unlearn the quick fix of “sexuality” as a taken-for-granted concept to explain erotic realities. Many of her interlocutors indeed refuse labels such as “lesbian” and avoid flags of sexual identity altogether. For this reason, Dankwa's material points to a more tacit queerness, which easily remains under the radar because of its “reluctance to commit to set identities, sexual or otherwise.”1 As a result, her book equally avoids the heavy term homophobia as a description for (let alone cause of) antiqueer sentiments. Troubling the monolithic story of “African homophobia,” which often circulates in Western media as well as among politicians, pastors, and spokespersons for African traditions, she depicts her interlocutors as neither stereotypical victims of a hostile society nor heroic resistance fighters, but as active subjects deeply embedded in the reproduction of a social and cultural world that can be inhospitable but also accommodating to (and even productive of) queer desire.Knowing Women might therefore upset dominant frameworks of LGBTQ+ activism that, when not depending on strategic victimization, often rely on the equally problematic romanticization of the people it tries to defend. While Dankwa foregrounds the agency, courage, and wisdom of “knowing women,” she never romanticizes their actions. We get to know them not only as loving, caring, and joking partners, but also as scheming, bullying, gossiping, meddling, manipulating, coaxing, and intimidating women. Moreover, Dankwa does not shy away from the pain, sadness, jealousies, and obsessions that characterize their relationships or from their potentially aggressive, abusive, and exploitative aspects.Describing dimensions of queer life that can easily irritate activist projects, the book also raises existential questions on what kind of activism is even thinkable without the recruiting ideas of sexuality or identity. While Dankwa does not answer these questions directly, she demonstrates the vital importance of approaching queer desire in contemporary Africa, not from (middle-class) activist circles that are usually easiest to speak to, but from the perspective of people whose erotic practices and subjectivities evade activist concerns. Insisting on the cultural value of discretion, indirect language, and tacit politics, Dankwa explicitly criticizes the universalizing tendencies of LGBTQ+ identities and troubles the way in which activism itself can become a desired identity that separates the activist from those she speaks for.• • •Beyond its originality vis-à-vis the existing literature and its avoidance of reductive narratives and frameworks, Knowing Women makes several concrete contributions to the growing archive of queer African studies.First, as mentioned above, Dankwa shows how working-class women, who rarely speak out (let alone overtly name) queer desires, produce a same-sex culture of discretion that is embedded in linguistic practices of circumlocution and indirection, which depend on cultural norms that vary among ethnic groups in southern Ghana. At the same time, she illustrates how same-sex passions are not therefore doomed to remain silent but generate much noise of their own—a queer noise that is very different from the confrontational hubbub of most activism. It seems to me that this characteristic alteration of specific forms of silence and noise can be a useful analytic elsewhere on the African continent (and beyond) for approaching queer politics without reinvigorating Euro-American notions of the “closet.”Second, to understand the recurrent masculine(ish) presentation and style of same-sex desiring women in contemporary Ghana, Dankwa shows how Halberstam's notion of “female masculinity” needs to be altered to accommodate a cultural and social context where “masculinity without men” is already part of the ordinary ways in which women pursue power.2 In this context, female masculinity is not necessarily perceived as an indication of sexual alterity. More fundamentally, the assumed masculinity of postmenopausal “big women,” powerful (sugar)mothers, or adolescent football girls does not prevent them from knotting relationships with men, conceiving children, and even using heterosexual marriage and family life as enablers for queer desires. In this respect, Knowing Women contributes to African feminist understandings and shows why the relational and situational category of seniority matters (at least) as much as gender in the dynamics of female same-sex relationships.Third, driven by her ethnographic material, Dankwa deliberately uses the prisms of friendship and kinship to study what might otherwise be settled all too quickly under the rubric of sexuality. Yet rather than collapsing the two, the book shows women using the language of (girl)friendship and kinship (especially sisterhood and mother-daughter terminology) to foreground different aspects of, and stages in, their same-sex relationships. While, over time, lovers can become kin and vice versa, friendship seems to imply a more passionate and potentially sexual bond, while kinship refers to a closeness, sharing, and commitment (as well as hierarchical ranking) that exceeds the sexual.Fourth, and this is perhaps her main contribution, Dankwa shows how working-class women actively weave and inscribe themselves into pragmatic networks of support that integrate different households and generations, and that consist of shifting constellations of relatives, friends, lovers, and male partners of different “knowing women.” As other scholars have shown, such extended queer families are vital for maintaining and renewing livelihoods in situations of precarity. But Dankwa demonstrates in particular how these moving networks “constitute a specific mode of sociality and of collectivizing love” (267; emphasis added). The omnipresence of overlapping love triangles, the passing on of lovers between friends, and the insistent mediating of family members and ex-lovers indeed reveals a social fabric where love is a collective rather than private matter. This crucial observation merits further study elsewhere.• • •Although an extensive comparative exercise remains beyond the scope of this commentary, a brief comparison between two erotic realities can be of interest for queer African studies. Knowing Women indeed reveals striking similarities but also important differences between the erotic culture of working-class women in Ghana and the queer world of same-sex desiring men in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who identify as fioto—a relatively recent Lingala term for sexually dissident “effeminate” men, whom I came to know during intensive fieldwork in Kinshasa and Kisangani between 2013 and 2016.First, some noteworthy similarities. Both in postcolonial Congo and Ghana, rumors about the supposedly “occult” nature of same-sex sexual practices circulate widely. Dankwa, for instance, notes how Ghanaian video-films feed on, visualize, and spread popular beliefs about “lesbian cults” whose (older and richer) members supposedly steal the fertility of (poorer and younger) women for the production of “money medicine” (182). In the DRC, men who have sex with men are also often said to steal the “life force” of their lovers. While such rumors usually focus on politicians, businessmen, and musicians, they also sustain imaginaries that affect the life of ordinary individuals. “Lesbianism” or “homosexuality” is thereby seen as a greedy antisocial force that short-circuits individual and social reproduction. Although an uncomfortable reality, the supposed links among same-sex sexual practices, occult power, and money need to be studied in further detail as a recurring issue, especially in contexts where same-sex desiring men and women cultivate secrecy as a mode of survival and form largely hidden erotic networks into which newcomers must be “initiated.”3Second, notwithstanding the potential hostility of public opinion, Ghanaian and Congolese urban environments often seem rather accommodating to sexual banter and play. Dankwa evokes a “culture of mockery” that is often benign rather than violent (63). She describes funerals, for instance, as productive of homoerotic intimacies (85–86).4 As such, she depicts the Ghanaian town and city as a surprisingly queer space of opportunities and affordances “knowing women” know how to grab and amplify. This is very similar to how fioto men approach the city in Kinshasa or Kisangani: they too cultivate knowledges on how to bend potential hostility and make the most of an urban culture and “ambiance” that can be as stimulating as it can be stifling.5Third, both in Ghana and the DRC, same-sex desiring individuals explicitly link sexual dissidence to fashionability.6 Many of Dankwa's respondents are preoccupied with cultivating a sophisticated style that can be performed on the urban stage (145). Same-sex relationships and networks are thereby self-consciously used to invent, achieve, and embody a life that testifies to their uniqueness in an urban environment where difficult living conditions homogenize between individuals. Also in Congolese cities, strong social pressures to conform are counterbalanced by a careful cultivation of individual singularities and eccentricities that make people stand out from their neighbors. It therefore seems to me that, despite their risks and dangers, queer habits and tastes graft on what Jane Guyer has called regional “traditions of invention” that treat “human variation . . . as a valued potential asset to be created and assiduously cultivated.”7Fourth, such self-cultivated fashionability is also part of a broader production of consumerist desire. Erotic networks are seen as conduits for the obtention of coveted goods and items that are essential to the creation and maintenance of stylish individuals who want to signal their knowledgeability of, and participation in, transnational trends. In this respect, same-sex relationships are not very different from cross-sex relationships. But they also supplement the Africanist focus on the transactionality of love by troubling the dominant directionality of romantic exchange (whereby women are expected to receive money and gifts from their male pursuers). Dankwa indeed shows how differences in age, experience, class, status, charm, and attraction disturb the dominant gendering of providing partners as more masculine (156). Nonetheless, it is striking that, just as among Congolese men, it is first and foremost the gender-dissident partners who are expected to “pay” for their “normal” lovers, as if they somehow needed to compensate for the expression of their dissident desire and intent.8Alongside these significant similarities, there are also some crucial differences between knowing women in Ghana and queer men in the Congo.First, while Dankwa describes a female world of discretion and indirection that eludes the visibility of LGBTQ+ activists, same-sex desiring men who live in popular neighborhoods in Congolese cities (the notion of “working-class” makes little sense here) are generally seen as all too “remarkable” by their middle-class counterparts. Given the benevolence of the Congolese bar scene toward sexual and gender transgression, queer culture is indeed often loud and deliberately provocative. Especially hypervisible fioto men known as “folles” are far from discreet. Yet, although their relative freedom is the result of “having nothing to lose,” they build reputations of their own and enforce a certain respect that is very different from middle-class “respectability.” This relative visibility of male same-sex desire is undoubtedly a consequence of gender ideologies that are less stringent on men than on women. But rather than opposing men's more manifest queerness and women's more tacit practices, it would be instructive to further study multiple modes of visibility and invisibility, as they interact in environments where people must negotiate social disapproval of, as well as popular fascination with, same-sex sexual practices.A second difference has to do with the relative presence or absence of sexual alterity within queer networks. While working-class Ghanaian women seem to create one tacit culture, the homoerotic world of men in the DRC is split in two halves that, although meeting in sexual and romantic encounters and relationships, do not produce a sense of overarching togetherness. Self-identified fioto men indeed see themselves as sexually different from the gender-normative men who are their (potential) partners and whose taste for sex with fioto men does not requalify their “normal” masculinity. Notwithstanding the actual variability in sexual practices and positions, a gendered logic of (anal) penetration effectively establishes a highly eroticized break between so-called normal (insertive) partners and fioto (receptive) partners.9 Hence, while “knowing women” weave a fabric of intimacy, solidarity, and relatedness by seducing other women into their common world of “collective love,” fioto men do not try to turn their partners into people like themselves but capture their “normal” masculinity in webs of desire and dependency.Queer men in urban Congo therefore create an internal sexual alterity that, although destabilized in practice, is constantly policed and reconfirmed. “Knowing women” in Ghana, however, rather seem to downplay the internal gendered differences and hierarchies they reproduce. This can be observed quite clearly when it comes to the initiation of new members. Dankwa describes how working-class women initiate others by sexually transmitting erotic knowledge from a senior lover to a junior lover, who can thereupon occupy a senior position of her own in subsequent relationships (while remaining junior in others). Fioto men also speak of “initiating” new men and boys but do not pass on erotic skills and knowledge through sex, but by teasing, joking, insisting, and mentoring.10 Because sex is supposedly reserved for “normal” men, sexual activities among fioto are frowned upon (and framed as “lesbianism” or merely childish play). Although, like in Ghana, homoerotic seduction largely entails convincing possible partners (based on the idea that everyone can be persuaded by a sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable seducer), seduction does not create a sense of commonality (let alone brotherhood) among same-sex desiring men. Many “knowing women” in Ghana, by contrast, (aspire to) create intimate bonds of sisterhood by “doing everything together.”In this sense, it should also be noted that, while not unheard of, fioto men do not so easily establish queer families and networks that are as fully embedded in heterosexual family life, marriage, and parenthood as those of “knowing women” in Ghana. Most queer men in Kinshasa and Kisangani indeed compartmentalize more strictly between family and sexual life—the latter being oriented to spaces and fields outside the family compound (such as bars, streets, beaches, hotel rooms, and small rental studios). Experienced as a direct threat to kinship, male same-sex desire therefore produces a queer world where “alternative families” of friends and (ex)partners blend more difficultly into existing genealogical networks of support.• • •Because of these fundamental differences, it would be misleading to conceive the sexual worlds of “knowing women” in Ghana and fioto men in the Congo as simply two versions of the same underlying principle of “homosexuality.” Because of the different ways in which gender, kinship, and urban socialities shape their limits and possibilities, they need to be taken as particular erotic ecosystems. Moreover, each in their own way, they provide a rich resource for rethinking queerness from “African” locations that remain marginalized vis-à-vis hegemonic centers of academic knowledge production. Some concluding observations on Dankwa's use of queerness can therefore further stimulate its redefinition.Knowing Women regularly mobilizes the word queer in its dominant meaning: as the subversion and defiance of norms. Yet, it also deflects queer scholarship's preoccupation with visibly defiant forms of queerness to more mundane, tacit, and nonconfrontational dynamics. Dankwa thereby comes to identify a domain of queerness beyond oppositional politics. At the same time, however, her critique of LGBTQ+ activism reinstates queerness as a creative “unruliness” (20) that resists the labels, categories, and identities most activism seems to require.This conceptual mobility of queerness is necessary for doing justice to the nuance of her ethnographic material. Indeed, while queerness can be understood only as a specific relationship to norms, the actual form of that relationship is not limited to oppositionality or antinormativity. More crucially, Dankwa foregrounds planes of queerness that seem immanent to normalizing fields and normative practices. Kinship, friendship, seniority, urban sociality, and postcolonial precarity turn out to be full of norms that already contain queer possibilities. At a certain point, Dankwa even hints at the queer affordances of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity (which are often only known for their stark condemnations of same-sex sexual activity). Queerness, in other words, is part and parcel of reality: the trick is only how to recognize and then amplify its existence.Consequently, Dankwa's work urges us to refashion queerness first and foremost as a product of knowing. Knowing Women is indeed about women who “know (how to do) it” (122). It is about the collective cultivation of a same-sex culture based on learning and sharing a sensory knowledge that allows one to “decipher” (80) erotic intentions and “value and pursue” queer desires (74). Acquired through initiation and practice, this “body-sensorial knowledge” largely eludes language and, when properly cultivated and transmitted, creates a palpably queer world that often remains unknown and unknowable.11 In this regard, Dankwa depicts a tacit culture that seems to draw from larger (West) African cultural logics that foreground the vital importance of hermeneutical skills to access the “underneath of things.”12 Although not without its dangers (for instance, reinforcing popular beliefs about secret lesbian sects), I see much value in reframing queer as an epistemological notion that resonates with a broader African(ist) literature.Finally, if Dankwa's material reshapes queerness as a specific kind of knowledge, “queering” becomes a practice of knowing that does not substantially differ from Dankwa's own anthropological project. “Knowing women” indeed had to “study” each other as much as Dankwa needed to study (and was studied by) them. Her work therefore attests to the force of ethnography as an embodied, affective, intimate, and erotic practice of transmission and transformation. Rather than appropriating “their” knowledge, Dankwa repeats knowing women's gesture and passes on their gift. As a seduction and invitation to learn, her book can now compel us to reciprocate them in turn—perhaps by acknowledging and then passing on queerness as the knowledge we are ultimately after.