Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction To Make Things Perfectly Queer
- 1 Anthropological Wormholes From Pederasts to Female Husbands
- 2 The Text that Dare not Speak its Name Forging Male Colonial Intimacies
- 3 The School for Scandal Missionary Positions & African Sexual Initiations
- 4 The Stuff of Desire Boarding School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
- 5 Apartheid, Queerness & Diaspora
- 6 Male & Female Mythologies
- Conclusion Trans Africa
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
1 - Anthropological Wormholes From Pederasts to Female Husbands
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction To Make Things Perfectly Queer
- 1 Anthropological Wormholes From Pederasts to Female Husbands
- 2 The Text that Dare not Speak its Name Forging Male Colonial Intimacies
- 3 The School for Scandal Missionary Positions & African Sexual Initiations
- 4 The Stuff of Desire Boarding School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
- 5 Apartheid, Queerness & Diaspora
- 6 Male & Female Mythologies
- Conclusion Trans Africa
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Ethnographers and anthropologists writing at the outset of the twentieth century have applied their own vocabularies to grapple with their notion of African homosexualities. Their attempt to marshal and regiment such a fluctuating range of sexualities resulted in an initial clash between sexual relativism and universalism, between indigenous and imported words. I here provide cautionary tales around the instabilities and at times the inappropriateness of terminology around Sub-Saharan African same-sex relations; they function as anthropological ‘wormholes’ or pre-texts to the literary texts that endorse them or enfeeble them and will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
Expressions and phrases to designate homosexuality exist in some fifty (Sub-Saharan) African languages – gor-jigeen in Wolof, ngochani in Shona, hasini in Nandi, ‘yan daudu in Hausa, mashoga (‘passive’ homosexual), mabasha (‘virile’ partner) in Kiswahili. While referring to ancestral practices in ‘traditional’, that is pre-industrial, societies, these terms are also common parlance in postcolonial African nation-states and are even imbued with a pre-queer feel, as in the Kenyan magai (after ‘gay’). These practices, however, do not always designate homosexuality as it is understood and experienced in the Western world. Indeed, words like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’, ‘queer’ and other originally imported words via English, French and other Western languages, come with a hurtling conglomerate of indigenous and other designations and their corollary practices. Also, the imported words are not always understood or are construed differently.
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- Out in AfricaSame-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Cultures, pp. 16 - 51Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013