Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
1 Queer Objects: Introduction
2 Intimate Rescue: Grammars, Logics, Subjects, Scenes
3 “Male-Power”: Virility, Vitality, and Phallic Rescue
4 Bead Necklaces: Encompassment and the Geometrics of
Citizenship
5 Plastics: Moral Pollution and the Matter of Belonging
6 Diapers: Intimate Exposures and the Underlayers of
Citizenship
7 The Homosexual Body: Gayism and the Ambiguous Objects of
Terror
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
George Paul Meiu is professor of anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Ethno-erotic Economies, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
“Queer Objects to the Rescue is brilliantly written, and it
provides us with a resilient scaffolding for theorizing queer
valance in Africa.”
*S. N. Nyeck, University of Colorado Boulder*
“This sophisticated critical study of queerness, objecthood, and
subjecthood offers novel approaches and languages for scholarly
engagement with identities situated in social, cultural, and
economic politics, histories of inclusion and exclusion, and
complex fabrications of (intimate) citizenships.”
*Besi Muhonja, James Madison University*
“Filled with smart arguments and clean-edged prose, Queer Objects
to the Rescue makes a signature contribution to the literature on
non-normative sexualities in Africa. It maps out novel terrain
for semiotic and new materialism theory, as well as for queer and
African studies, and it richly unsettles simplistic accounts of
homophobia and citizenship in Kenya today.”
*Charles Piot, Duke University*
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