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‘Aid for gays’: the moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2014

Crystal Biruk
Crystal Biruk*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Oberlin College, 10 N. Professor Street, King Building, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA
*
Email: cbiruk@oberlin.edu
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Abstract

In recent years, ‘African homophobia’ has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that ‘homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion – partially expressed through homophobic discourse – in Malawi. The article analyses the cascade of events that led to a moment of political and economic crisis in mid-2011, with special focus on how a 2009 sodomy case made homophobia available as a new genre of social commentary. Employing discourse analysis of newspaper articles, political speeches, the proceedings of a sodomy case, and discussions about men who have sex with men (MSM) as an HIV risk group, I show how African homophobia takes form via interested deployments of ‘cultural’ rhetoric toward competing ends. This article lends a comparative case study to a growing literature on the political and social functions of homophobia in sub-Saharan Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 447 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at Brown University's Pembroke Seminar in 2012 and at the Northeast Workshops on Southern Africa (NEWSA) in 2013, where audiences provided critical feedback. I am grateful to Gift Trapence, the late Pierson Ntata, Joe Fischel, Poulomi Saha and Bianca Dahl for helpful suggestions and conversations. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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