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• W4310189390 abstract "I am very grateful to Aminata Mbaye, Rachel Spronk, and Thomas Hendriks for their insightful and rich responses—and indeed extensions—to my book Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana. For a book that took so long to blossom, there is nothing more rewarding than having such nuanced and inspiring interlocutors. I will be able to respond to only a fraction of the issues they raise.In a narrative that sought to document the experiences and knowledges that unfolded in the research encounters and in my interlocutors' life histories, my book was indeed an attempt to decolonize queer and feminist theories. Thus, I highly appreciate Mbaye's gesture toward African feminist fiction writers whose stories speak of taboo subjects including erotic friendship and sexual intimacy between women. The richness and the poetry of these stories speak a language of their own, capturing the complexities of practices that may not speak their own names and certainly not in a language that is legible to an international public. My book tries to honor that discretion without neglecting the interactive context in which my interlocutors' stories were told and became alive. Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and other African American feminists have long written about the power of storytelling, poetry, and fictional writing for those whose lives go unseen and do not seem to matter. In 1987, Barbara Christian claimed that creative writing is a form of theorizing that takes personal knowledge and the sensuality of language as its starting point.1 I finalized Knowing Women in Europe with nonacademic queer Afropean readers in mind. My imagined readership was thus struggling to reconcile their queerness with their blackness. I hope that recounting (nonfictional) stories makes the book more accessible to all readers. At the time of this writing, I am working to broaden the book's scope and accessibility through organizing book readings in multiple languages, concentrating on Afropean activist spaces and queer community libraries that seek to actively decolonize their archives and imaginings.Knowing Women develops an exciting life of its own both within the processes of translation into nonacademic spaces and in academic conversations like this one. I shy away from generalizations and love retelling rather than anthropologizing these stories. For that reason, I am uncomfortable to read “knowing women” as a label that may become reified as a category of experience. As Spronk highlights, the reification of sexual categories is an ongoing tendency of sexuality scholarship, “despite the recognition that identities are performative.” Knowing women has a double meaning: it refers both to women who are in the know and to the intimate knowing of another woman. Given that the working-class women I met in Ghana between 2006 and 2012 did not label themselves, the term allowed me to grasp their narrative selves and my specific experiences with them. I used it is a heuristic device and tried to the keep its essentialism strategic, but it becomes bigger and perhaps necessarily so. I thus appreciate Spronk's focus on my efforts to rethink intimacy and to write about the erotic beyond the weighty concept of sexual identity rather than adding another label to the ever-expanding LGBT+ alphabet.As for wealthier women who were not part of the study, Mbaye wonders if they have fewer reservations toward “Western gender categorizations.” Again, thinking of wealthier women, we need to distinguish between different age groups and between more or less cosmopolitan lifestyles and travels. At the time of my study, queer globalization had not hit Ghana, nor had female-led activism taken shape in Accra, or at least not yet as visible queer activism. More recent initiatives that advocate for queer women's rights are indeed often spearheaded by working professionals with strong ties to the Black diaspora in the global North; their courageous activism places at risk their affiliation to Ghana's heteronormative upper-middle classes. And yes, they do identify with metropolitan categories of gender and sexuality and are bound to resort to an LGBT+ logic, while leading more complex queer love lives themselves and certainly not just while abroad.Mbaye's admonishment that religion does not receive much attention in the book, despite its importance in my interlocutors' lives, might indeed be a result of my European (academic) socialization. At the same time, it was also hampered by my personal search for a spirituality practicable in Ghana. This search made it hard for me to sit through charismatic sermons that often sounded to my ears capitalist and profit-driven, hollow, or hypocritical; it was difficult to pretend to be praying and listening when I was taking mental notes. Furthermore, there were only few regular churchgoers among my respondents, and not all of them were comfortable taking me to their own places of worship. My Muslim respondents did not volunteer to take me to worship with them at all. Rudolf Gaudio's notion of faithful irreverence resonates with women I interviewed like Ma'Abena, who is committed to affiliation with Christianity while being selective about what she chooses to listen and adhere to and what she relativizes or ignores. However, among my mostly Christian respondents I did not observe the (seemingly) sacrilegious talk and brazen playfulness with its underlying piety to the extent Gaudio did among his Muslim respondents.2 This may be owing not least to the different historical trajectories Islam and Christianity have in inscribing themselves into West African cultures and languages.Some of the similarities and differences Hendriks carefully sketches out between male same-sex cultures in the Democratic Republic of Congo and female same-sex cultures in Ghana give much food for thought, in particular Hendriks's observations about the structuring effects of gender between fioto and the gender-normative men they love. The “eroticized break between so-called normal insertive partners and fioto receptive partners” manifests itself in two halves and precludes a shared sense of community or family, whereby only fioto are visible and marked as the Other in society. In Ghana too, female-read persons who are transgressing gender boundaries through a visual masculine style are becoming increasingly visible as a growing queer community in and of itself. The differences Hendriks observes tie in with the asymmetries of sexism as well as the burden and blessing of motherhood that puts women and persons with a uterus in the realm of family-making more than cis-gendered men.As for his suggestion that women in Ghana seem to understand themselves more through a language of kinship and to weave larger networks of mutual support than men in the DRC, the imperative of motherhood must be considered. The family networks among working-class women, regardless of their sexual intimacies, hinge on women's care obligations in general, and social desire for motherhood with its specific care obligation. Not least in the matrilineal Akan context, the quest to aggrandize in order to be seen as a full adult makes it important for women to raise at least one child, ideally one's own. Perhaps this very broad imperative requires many women to think in familial terms, both genealogically and metaphorically, if only to provide the necessary support to children and meet care obligations within their gendered families of origin.The second difference concerns gender within same-sex relationships. Consider the more “masculine” partner within a female couple: no matter how much power the (female) man may express or represent, still “he” may be considered transgressive within society at large. Thus, even if we were to construe masculinity as greater dominance within a same-sex relationship, this does not necessarily coincide with more power in society. The masculinity of a cis-man and the masculinity of a female-read person are already framed differently, in ways that may reduce these “men's” power and thus the imbalances within female couples and networks. Yet, while an ɔbaa barima (manly woman) may be punished for her masculinity in some instances, masculinity, as everywhere, goes with (subtle) privileges. This holds true for a confident ɔbaa barima who pursues more opportunities and thus tends to venture into better paid jobs, for instance. This, I imagine, shapes the dynamics among women, differently from those among men, where the transgressive, feminine partner loses certain privileges not just because of their transgressiveness, but also as a result of their actual (successful) performance of femininity, hence experiencing oppression because of their feminine status in some contexts. The power difference may indeed be smaller within a gendered female same-sex couple, as misogyny crosscuts gender non-normativity.As I compare these differences and therefore distinguish between female (sex) and feminine (gender), I realize once more how difficult it is not to reinscribe the Cartesian mind/body split (hence the dichotomy between “biological” sex and social gender) into the research about erotic subjectivities. While I am acutely aware of biology's infinite variety and of Judith Butler's admonition that sex itself is a construct, writing about sexism and gender-based injustices, I cannot do without these categorical distinctions. Again, I am hoping to be read as a strategic essentialist who aims at thinking and undoing sexism “from both ends.”3 Hence while deconstructing sex/gender binaries on the one hand, we also need to oppose the very real consequences of sexism that operate on the grounds of these reductionist, biologistic categories. The paradox is even more urgent and necessary as sexist realities underpin and permeate both hetero- and homopolitics.Returning to sexuality, Spronk addresses the incommensurability of politics of visibility with tacit forms of agency, deducing a far-reaching critique of sexuality and the antinormativity of Anglo-American queer studies. She argues that norms cannot be seen as just the opposite of queer freedoms, as they tend to be accompanied by real-life transgressions, contingencies, and spaces of variation. However, given the recent waves of homophobia in Ghana and elsewhere, the question is, under what conditions can norms effectively hold ambiguities and variation? Certainly, a tacit awareness of norms as imagined or “mythical,”4 hence as ideal-typical orientations that must not correspond to the realities of a majority of us, is the key to a contingent handling of normativity. Whereas Ghanaian cultures of discretion coupled with a tacit understanding of the inconsistencies of everyday life have been good at accommodating alternative genders and sexual desires, the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values” bill, an anti-LGBT law proposed by a Ghanaian member of parliament in August 2021, tries to stamp out that very tacitness. Instead, it inscribes rigid boundaries between hetero- and homosexuality, between men and women, and pushes a very binary, static notion of moral norms and their others. But even more, the bill discourages any form of unspoken acceptance, by criminalizing allies and calling upon everyone to denounce those whose practices seem to lie outside a narrow framework of a “proper” gender, sexuality, and family life.How to oppose a dehumanizing and violently heteronormative bill without being antinormative? Is resistance possible without deploying the oppositional logics of categorizing and claiming minority rights and thereby applying the boundary drawing “master's tools” in attempting to dismantle “the master's house”5? And beyond the politics, how to account for the ways in which even porous norms impact our being and perhaps even more so when draconian laws are up for discussion? I do not have answers to these questions, but the hope that the much-needed resistance to this bill and its evangelists does not eat up all our energies but leaves spaces to explore modes of doing and knowing “queer” intimacies beyond the pro- and antigay antagonism. What is encouraging in this debate: more than 130 memoranda have been filed against the proposed bill, and prominent Ghanaian intellectuals—including NETRIGHT, the Network for Women's Rights in Ghana—who used to be silent on this issue have spoken out against the bill from decolonial and African feminist perspectives. While the debate has done damage not just to queer activists but to same-sex “friends” whose intimate knowledge of each other has come under scrutiny, the bill itself is still pending and the government seems to be using delay tactics. It remains to be hoped that the discussions open up new grounds for the effective decolonization of all that has fallen under the banners of gender and sexuality." @default.
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• W4310189390 date "2022-12-01" @default.
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• W4310189390 title "Politics and Poetics" @default.
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