Queer studies and religion in Southern Africa: The production of queer Christian subjects

Abstract

The question of how to write about queer Africa has been a significant debate in scholarship over the last decade. One of the key emerging areas, in the development of ‘queer Africa scholarship’ has been through the framing of queer African subjects at the intersections with religion and in particular, Christianity. As scholars begin to further imagine queer African subjects as Christian, it is important to explore how and in what ways these subjectivities are constructed. In this article, I apply a qualitative analysis to academic literature that explicitly focuses on, or includes a substantive analysis of queer Christians and/or queer Christianity in Southern Africa. While Southern Africa is not representative of the entire continent, this region is a productive site within which to understand how queer subjects are imagined to be situated, what they are imagined to be doing and how they are imagined to be doing what they do. The context produces queer and LGBTI + (this acronym is sometimes preferred to 'queer' to refer collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and in various other ways as gender and/or sex non‐conforming.) subjects who find and make religious homes within legally permissive and restrictive countries and do so through a variety of normative, queer and normatively queer ways, thus revealing religious and sexual contradictions and boundary crossing. This has opened up numerous ways of understanding how religion can be negotiated and transformed in this region. I conclude by examining the theoretical and epistemological possibilities that are revealed through the current imaginings of queer Christian subjects in Southern Africa, as well as the potential these understandings offer for different spaces and new discourses in future scholarship.

Expanding the Horizontal Call: A Typology of Social Influence on the Call to Ministry

“…While our primary focus in this paper was on gender, future research should attend to differences in the social shaping of call across demographic factors including race, age, sexual orientation, and denomination (Edwards and Oyakawa 2022; McQueeney 2009; Plummer 2021; Robertson 2020). More than 60 years ago, H. Richard Niebhur (1956:63–66), in his study of theological education, argued that different denominations and religious groups at different points in history have held different aspects of the call to ministry as most important—whether that be the secret call (similar to Pitt's “vertical call”), the providential call (having the gifts and talents necessary to fulfill the role), or the ecclesiastical call (i.e., “the summons and invitations extended to a man [sic] by some community or institution of the Church” [64]).…”

Queering Traditions, Decolonizing Queerness: A Literature Review of Queer Worldmaking Tradition Bearers

“…Xavier Livermon (2015) and Megan Robertson (2021) analyze an African spiritual possession as told in a first-person account by Zulu South African Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde.…”

“…Other intentionally transformative traditions I found in South Africa are the reinterpretation of sacred texts and the creation of queer theology. Megan Robertson (2021) and Gerald West, Charlene van der walt, Kapya John Kaoma (2016) both discuss queer Africans who participate in disidentificatory re-readings of the Christian Bible.…”

African Studies Keywords: Queer

“…Most inquiries into the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of African queer studies demonstrate the multifarious and contradictory shapes that queer takes in and across continental Africa, and the uses and abuses, if you will, of queer as a category, concept, and a way of being on the continent (cf. Currier & Migraine-George 2016, 2018; Macharia 2015; Migraine-George & Currier 2016; Ncube 2018; Nyeck 2020; Osinubi 2018; Robertson 2021). One only has to look at Kwame Otu’s (2022) ethnography on queer self-fashioning in Ghana, which explores how a community of self-identified effeminate men in Ghana, known in local parlance as sasso , navigate homophobia amid the increased visibility of LGBT+ human rights politics, to understand these complexities.…”