Topics: Culture, Sexuality and Global Health

Catalog description

What does it mean to claim that "Homosexuality is un-African"? This course explores the linked histories of race, nation, gender and sexuality in Africa that such an ideological claim invokes, yet effaces. The polemics that produce statements like this play out through the disciplinary tensions that exist between African and sexuality/queer studies. These tensions have as much to do with the role played by the relation between sexuality and race within cultures of European colonization, as they have with the role of gender and sexuality within postcolonial power relations in Africa. Such antagonisms are sustained through the marginalization of gender and sexuality perspectives within postcolonial scholarship on Africa, as well as the bracketing of African perspectives in queer and feminist studies. This course will deconstruct these impasses by exploring scholarship at the margins of each area of study. Students will be encouraged to ask questions about how issues of race, ethnicity, nation, gender and sexuality are produced as suppressed presences in a range of texts, films and other materials. The course will include readings from postcolonial, gender, sexuality and African studies, anthropology, history, literary studies and Marxism, giving students a grounding in historical and contemporary perspectives at the intersection of African, queer and feminist studies.