Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
In Sexual Diversity in Africa, contributors critically engage with current debates about sexuality and gender identity, as well as with contentious issues relating to methodology, epistemology, ethics, and pedagogy. Edited by S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht, the book presents a tapestry of issues that testify to the complex nature of sexuality, sexual practices, and gender performance in Africa.
The following excerpt is from Sylvia Tamale’s afterword on “The Politics of Sexual Diversity”.
Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, and Citizenship comes at a time when Africa has been placed under the global spotlight of sexual conservatism accompanied with the systemic oppression of those who do not conform to dominant heterosexual ideologies of femininity and masculinity. Indeed, the continent has come under scathing attack – largely from Western governments, funding agencies, international NGOs, and media – for repressive and regressive regimes that discriminate against individuals who espouse same-sex orientation and non-conforming gender identities. Unfortunately, most of these critiques occur outside the context of a well-grounded understanding of the historical, socio-economic, cultural, and political forces that have fuelled global hegemonies, and the structural inequalities they reflect. Hence, they often “otherize” the phenomena of homophobia and transphobia. In other words, the geopolitical differentials of race, power, and economics that dominate the global stage have found their way into contemporary debates on sexual orientation and gender identity on the African continent – from the deployment of aid conditions tied to expanding LGBTI protections to the hypocritical selective double standards of accountability and responsibility (e.g., supporting African leaders that are tainted with rigged elections, detentions-without-trial, corruption, abuse of media freedoms, etc.).
(…)
The burgeoning scholarship on non-conforming sexualities and gender identities in Africa is simultaneously pushing the boundaries of African feminisms and challenging the exclusionary democratic and constitutional paradigms. It has led to complex explorations of methodological and epistemological issues that challenge orthodox constructions of knowledge in the wider quest for postcolonial justice. This research has illuminated the intricate links between sexuality, gender, power, and politics. Even then, it has only excavated the surface and has yet to uncover the full liberatory and transformative potential of the phenomenon of sexuality. Arguably the last bastion of essentialized subjectivity and legitimized discrimination, homophobia, and transphobia must be viewed within the wider democratic struggles around the world.
It is against the backdrop of these developments that my country – Uganda – has become the locus par excellence of homophobia. This is largely thanks to the infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill that was tabled in the Ugandan parliament in 2009 and reintroduced in 2012. The draconian bill, which dangles like the sword of Damocles over the heads of all Ugandans, seeks to tighten the noose around the necks of homosexuals and transgendered individuals and those who advocate their rights. Its primary objective is to deal a final blow to what its proponents describe as “un-African” abominable acts that offend culture and threaten the institution of the traditional Ugandan family. The bill also seeks to protect Uganda’s children from what it describes as a massive “recruitment campaign” into homosexuality. There are several disturbing parallels between such unfounded accusations in Uganda and those from the Cold War McCarthy era and current conservative Christian accusations in the United States. State moral panics have always served as an effective decoy to distract attention from the more significant socio-economic and political crises that afflict society. This was as true of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime that targeted Jews and homosexuals as it is of the current economic woes in most Western countries being attributed to foreign migrants. Just as Nazi Germany created a phalanx of laws and regulations that targeted homosexuality, Western governments today churn out new and ever more intricate regimes of discrimination in immigration, dresscodes (e.g., the Islamic veil), and religion (e.g. the controversy over Islamic minarets in Switzerland). By creating these artificial scapegoats, the political elite dislocates social anxieties while further entrenching themselves in power.
Homophobic sentiments and intolerance of sexual and gender diversity are not the exclusive bane of Africa or non-Western societies. The current trend that seeks to reinvent Africa as a heterosexual continent and Europe as the heart of sexual democracy is dangerous and divisive. Indeed, the homophobic laws that currently exist on the continent were a direct import from former European colonial powers. Increasingly, research and scholarship show that sexuality in pre-colonial Africa was more complicated than the idealized heterosexuality that contemporary African leaders have sought to colonize and reinterpret as African tradition. Attempts by the political and religious elite to construct African models of sexuality are designed to facilitate control and regulation. Thus the claim that same-sex erotic activity is un-African simply becomes a metaphor for the propagation of conservative oppressive agendas.
In the Global North, even as the domino effect of the decriminalization of homophobic laws has swept across Europe in the last few decades, the United States is still very much engaged in the struggle to eradicate homophobic and transphobic attitudes. Moreover, this struggle even in Europe has proved much more challenging than the success of legal reform. Even as US politics on sexual diversity continue to evolve, there are many examples of legal reform in non- Western countries (albeit fraught with contradictions and tensions), including South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, India, and Nepal, from which the West could cull a few lessons. Nyeck and Epprecht’s anthology demonstrates that a nuanced multidisciplinary theorizing of sexual diversity in Africa is essential for the wider project of engendering transformative change and building a peaceful and sustainable continent. We all look forward to a future when sexual diversity is unconditionally celebrated around the world.
To learn more about Sexual Diversity in Africa, click here.
For media inquiries, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.