Introduction:

Hendriks, Thomas; Spronk, Rachel

doi:10.2307/j.ctvx8b7xw.5

Cited by 5 publications

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“… 2. The phrase “reading queer from Africa” echoes the recent call for “reading sexualities from Africa” (Hendriks & Spronk 2020). …”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Clearly, scholarship in queer African studies demonstrates the rich diversity and complexity of gendered and sexual subjectivities and the related embodied and performative practices that exist on the African continent, in addition to the ways in which these have developed historically and in the context of contemporary politics and advocacy. The task at hand is “to queer both ‘sexuality’ and ‘Africa,’ letting them speak to one another and engage in a productive relationship” (Hendriks & Spronk 2020:6), and to generate a creative, discursive “vortex” between the categories of “queer” and “Africa” that destabilizes rigid and essentialist categorizations (Currier & Migraine-George 2016:283). This productive exchange, Keguro Macharia (2019) reminds us, can also be fractious, generating unforeseen possibilities, opening up the potential for both “queering African studies” and “Africanizing queerness” (Geschiere 2017:9).…”

Section: “Africa” and “Queer” As Oppositional?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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African Studies Keywords: Queer

Otu¹,

Klinken²

2023

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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“Queer” is a relatively recent and somewhat controversial term in African studies. Yet it is proving to be productive, not only for understanding African subjectivities of sexuality and gender, but also for situating Africa’s position in the larger economy of knowledge. Otu and van Klinken explore the productive tensions between “queer” and “Africa,” and aim to read Africa as queer and to read queer from Africa. Thus, rather than imagining Africa and queer as polar opposites, the authors seek to harness the critical, productive, and creative affinities between these two terms that are vital for the project of decolonizing and queering queer Africa.

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“… 2. The phrase “reading queer from Africa” echoes the recent call for “reading sexualities from Africa” (Hendriks & Spronk 2020). …”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: “Africa” and “Queer” As Oppositional?mentioning

confidence: 99%

African Studies Keywords: Queer

Otu¹,

Klinken²

2023

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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“…While health, justice, and their violations are crucial to investigate and act upon, when the production of knowledge about same‐sex sexualities in Africa remains limited to social problems, it does not take into consideration the wider characteristics and implications, and consequently produces incomplete knowledge (Hendriks & Spronk 2020; Izugbara, Undie & Khamasi 2010; Nyanzi, Nassimbwa, Kayizzi & Kabanda 2008; Tamale 2011). The question is how to cast the net wider, in order to study how both challenging and less problematic circumstances may co‐exist.…”

Section: Sexuality Research In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Family matters: same‐sex relations and kinship practices in Kenya

Andrikopoulos,

Spronk

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Guided by social justice and sexual health concerns, scholars of same‐sex sexualities in Africa have mainly examined related conflicts and inequities, generating an unbalanced emphasis on homophobia. Following Stella Nyanzi's plea for a broader exploration of queer sexuality in Africa, we move beyond the strictly sexual sphere to study the kinship arrangements of same‐sex couples in Kenya. These couples rely on the different possibilities afforded by kinship – in both its inclusive and exclusive capacities – to create accommodation and acceptance. Capturing the complexities and paradoxes of social life, the ethnographic study of kinship practices in everyday life shows how homophobia and accommodation can co‐exist. Furthermore, the embeddedness of same‐sex relationships in kinship structures and the subscription of same‐sex couples to the same norms held by cross‐sex couples clearly indicates the difficulty of construing these forms of relatedness as essentially different from other kinship formations. Thus ‘queering queer Africa’ requires not only taking a broader perspective and looking beyond what is usually classified as ‘queer’ but also un‐queering what at first appears as queer and thus ‘queerying’ the barriers and the range of possibilities that characterize the lives and subjectivities of people with same‐sex desires.

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“…And yet, queer is manifestly taken up by other activists across the continent. The field of queer African studies is also quickly developing as a home-grown space of encounter and reflection, drawing from postcolonial, transnational and decolonial perspectives (see, for example, Ekine and Abbas 2013; Hendriks and Spronk 2020; Matebeni 2014).…”

Section: Norms Are Already Queermentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Making men fall’: queer power beyond anti-normativity

Hendriks¹

2021

Africa

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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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Introduction:

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

African Studies Keywords: Queer

African Studies Keywords: Queer

Family matters: same‐sex relations and kinship practices in Kenya

‘Making men fall’: queer power beyond anti-normativity

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