Despite its pervasive homophobia, everyday life in urban Democratic Republic of Congo is full of queer affordances that are of particular interest for understanding larger socioeconomic changes, shifting gender dynamics, and recurring cosmopolitan aspirations. Ethnographic fieldwork in Kinshasa and Kisangani reveals how male same‐sex desire is produced, distributed, and consumed in a “homoerotic economy” that generates its own characteristic instabilities. My interlocutors constantly renegotiate this economy's dominant logic of penetration and solve its underlying “problem” of sexual versatility through a creative vocabulary of erotic SIM cards. Closely analyzing these processes sheds new light on the hegemonic notions of sexual “activity” and “passivity” as particularly unstable markers of erotic belonging. [desire, masculinity, homosexuality, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa] Malgré une homophobie omniprésente, la vie quotidienne urbaine en République Démocratique du Congo offre maintes opportunités queer, révélatrices de changements socioéconomiques plus larges, de transformations de genre et d'aspirations cosmopolites récurrentes. Cette étude ethnographique à Kinshasa et à Kisangani montre comment le désir sexuel entre hommes est produit, distribué et consommé dans le cadre d'une « économie homoérotique » qui engendre ses propres instabilités caractéristiques. Dans cette économie, mes interlocuteurs renégocient au quotidien sa logique dominante de pénétration et résolvent son « problème » inhérent de la versatilité sexuelle à travers un vocabulaire créatif de cartes SIM érotiques. Une analyse approfondie de ces processus démontre que les notions hégémoniques d’ « activité » et de « passivité » sexuelle sont des marqueurs d'appartenance érotique particulièrement instables. [désir, masculinité, homosexualité, République Démocratique du Congo, Afrique]

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This article illustrates the theoretical productivity of the recent ontological turn in anthropology as a way to further 'anthropologize' queer studies by taking seriously erotic alterity as an ethnographic situation that unlocks possibilities for radically rethinking desire beyond the limiting framework of 'sexuality'. It proposes a thought experiment with the specific ways in which same-sex loving men and boys in contemporary urban Congo conceptualize desire as a self-affirming predatory force that joyfully queers the 'normal' world. Rather than ethnographically representing 'their' erotic concepts, this article tries to think through them and calls for a non-melancholic theorization of desire. Keywords Alterity, anthropology, Democratic Republic of Congo, ontological turn, same-sex desire '.. . only by absorbing the other as oneself does one become something at all.' (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1997: 195-196) 'Anthropologizing' queer studies Queer theory and queer studies-so it is loudly proclaimed or softly whispered within anthropology departments-have somehow 'lost connection' to the 'real

Contemporary African societies are regularly depicted as inherently homophobic cultural spaces by Western media. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among self-consciously effeminate fioto men and their so-called 'normal' boyfriends in Kinshasa (DRC), this article troubles such monolithic images of 'African homophobia'. My interlocutors' deliberately provocative readings of music, video clips, urban painting and street performances bring to the fore surprisingly queer complicities within popular culture. Rather than discovering a 'gay' subculture hiding in the shadows of the city, this article reveals the possibilities for sexual eccentricity at the surface of urban life and demonstrates how, despite its often moralistic and sometimes violent messages, popular culture is itself always already queer. Moreover, pointing at the usually overlooked homoerotic affordances of urban ambiance as a social field for the accumulation of 'transgressive capital', my fioto interlocutors celebrate the proliferation of queer desires in spite ofand, perhaps, because ofeveryday performances of homophobia.

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought of in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. ‘Transgression’ thereby becomes an implicit or explicit act of resistance against the norm. This is particularly clear in Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has – paradoxically – become a field-defining norm. Yet such strong anti-normativity can become a liability when trying to do justice to actually existing queer dynamics in past and present African realities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork among sexually dissident young men who call themselves ‘fioto’ in urban Democratic Republic of Congo, this article shifts the always already oppositional relationship between queerness and normativity – not by arguing that queer is normal too or by showing that queer lives produce their own norms alongside heteronormativity, but by suggesting that queerness is a potential of normativity, rather than an opposition to it. It specifically thinks with two groups of fioto friends in Kisangani to show how and why norms generated their own queerness – as something that was already there as an inherent dimension of their own dynamism and multiplicity.

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In this article I explore the limits of Anne McClintock’s conceptualization of the ‘porno-tropics’ as a concept to understand the everyday lives of an isolated group of European expatriates working for a logging company in the Congolese rainforest. Based on long-term ethnographic research, I give a reading of two sets of images I encountered during my fieldwork – a soft-erotic calendar and a hardcore porn site – to come to a better understanding of the actual discourses and practices of interracial sex along the racial divide. To get a grip on the economy of desire at my fieldwork site, I focus on two figures who are largely overlooked by McClintock’s analysis: the continuing influence of the white woman as an ‘absent presence’ in the post-colony and the ambiguous presence of the black man as both an emasculating body and a resource in the construction of ‘white’ masculinities.