Queer Africa

Catalog description

As the course title suggests, in "Queer Africa,” we will question the pervasive assumptions that normalize heterosexuality in Africa and explore the diverse sexual practices, identities, and performances that queer African sexual cultures. We will put into conversation theoretical, scholarly, and historical texts which ground the emergent field of African queer studies, with the memoirs, fiction, digital media, and visual culture produced by the African writers, artists, and activists who have boldly taken up the project of representing queer lives and cultures in/from African contexts. We will also consider how dissident sexualities in Africa have been constituted, erased, and criminalized by colonial and postcolonial discourses, structures, and states.