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• W4310366592 abstract "In her classic 1987 book Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Amadiume accused lesbian-identified women from the African diaspora of using “prejudiced interpretations of African situation to justify their choice of sexual alternatives,” taking “such practices as-woman-to-woman marriages as lesbian.” Amadiume condemned such interpretations as “totally inapplicable, shocking and offensive” to the women whose culture was being represented.1 The interpretation in question was that of Audre Lorde, who noted that woman-woman marriages were an institutionalized facet of women's independence in West Africa, sometimes erotic and sometimes aimed at building a lineage. Lorde's observation was based on Melville Herskovits's 1938 ethnography of Dahomey, which described woman-woman marriages and stated that some of them were lesbian in nature. Her purpose was to note diasporic women's profound legacy of institutionalized female intimacy.2Neither argument has aged well. Recent forms of political homophobia overshadow Amadiume's urgent reminder of African communities' rights to determine the terms through which they are represented. Lorde was less interested in Dahomey than in recuperating traditions of female intimacy, and her engagement with questions of ethnographic method and ethics was at best cursory. Nonetheless, her dependence on Herskovits reads oddly in the present moment, when he is remembered largely for institutionalizing racial bias in US African studies. However the problem is posed, and whatever the empirical basis of the argument, the issues that separated Amadiume and Lorde retain currency, posing crucial problems of identity and recognition, ethics, and the politics of knowledge.Serena Dankwa's book, Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana, has provided a compelling example of how some of these dilemmas might be addressed. The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of writing on same-sex intimacies in Africa. Activists, artists, filmmakers, and scholars belie contentions that homosexuality is a foreign imposition and insist on the specificity of African self-understandings. Their newly prominent voices resound in a moment when popular homophobia and state repression often make speaking up an act of bravery. An interdisciplinary array of scholars has addressed this fraught situation,3 though relatively few have centrally addressed the problem of investigating a phenomenon that differs from its own categorization.Dankwa is not the first anthropologist to have written extensively on issues of same-sex desire and identity.4 Nonetheless, this book represents an important move forward, bringing her ethnographic sensibilities into conversation with a broader and sophisticated, politicized literature that is equally skeptical of area studies and queer theory emanating from the global North.5 Dankwa's fieldwork centers on women in southern Ghana who pursue romantic and erotic relationships with other women, and her book opens with familiar tropes of arrival and encounter that anthropologists have long used to set the stage and establish methodological and theoretical bona fides. At the same time, she troubles the delimitations of her own research project. While Dankwa's interlocutors are self-aware, canny agents of their own lives and desires—the “knowing women” of her title—Dankwa resists categorizing them as such, in no small part because they themselves resist such categorization. Indeed, the book is structured around this central theoretical and narrative challenge: how to write about a group of people when describing them as a group is to distort their own experiences and self-perception.In her contribution to this forum, Aminata Cecile Mbaye picks up on this decolonial quality to Dankwa's intervention, her refusal to let Western LGBTQ+ identities inflect her understanding of her interlocutors’ experience while also refusing to refute them. Dankwa's account makes what Anthony Appiah has called the “space-clearing gesture”6 of stepping outside the strictures of Western domination and simple resistance to it. Mbaye underlines the creativity of the women in Dankwa's book in charting out their own lives, demonstrating also how significant insistent self-assertation is for decolonization itself. Mbaye also raises an important question, as yet too little explored, of how religious belief and practice inform and inflect the lives of the women in this book. Dankwa makes it clear that religion is not simply a source of homophobia or condemnation. Despite a few important exceptions. too often religion has been treated as antithetical to African queer lives.7 Mbaye reminds us what a disservice that is.Rachel Spronk points out the significance of secrecy and discretion in Dankwa's account. The account of secrecy here is quite distinct from that in Georg Simmel's famous discussion.8 Rather than being a body of knowledge whose covert status binds secret-holders together in community, secrecy maintained through discretion and verbal indirection in southern Ghana opens up space for same-sex desiring women to lead lives at odds with prevailing norms of motherhood and appropriate female behavior. This is not secrecy à la Simmel; it also is distinct from the regime of (not) knowing that characterizes the Western closet, and Spronk underlines the complex relationship Dankwa's interlocutors have to Western (and global-inspired) LGBTQ+ rights movements, some sympathetic, some hostile or indifferent, some unaware. This complexity demonstrates the need for agnosticism for LGBTQ+ identities, and indeed (Spronk argues) for the category of sexuality itself. The point, as Dankwa suggests, is not that these are utterly irrelevant for working-class women in southern Ghana. Rather, such global identities and movements offer opportunities for modes of self-understanding that some might find useful. But the heterogeneity here highlights the need for careful description and analytics that can accommodate such complexity.Thomas Hendriks provides a rigorous outline of Dankwa's manifold interventions, in West African ethnography, African feminism, queer studies, and African queer discourse, and then develops a provocative project, a comparison of the women in Dankwa's book to same-sex desiring “fioto” men in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who share characteristics like a popular association with the occult and a cultivation of fashionability and a distinctive style. Hendriks's observation points to the issue that troubles Dankwa throughout. Any project of comparison and commensuration, whether taxonomic, of political solidarity, or making a claim for rights and recognition, returns to the issues of categorization and labeling that Dankwa and her interlocutors resist. Dankwa observes that her undertaking relies on the paradox implied by Gayatri Spivak's famous invocation of a strategic essentialism, for political reasons claiming a subject-position that one also wishes to deconstruct. Hendriks notes that Dankwa has borrowed this queer approach from her interlocutors, a move that is both political and quintessentially anthropological. Indeed, while Dankwa wears her anthropological and scholarly acumen lightly, I would agree with our contributors that her book is most formidable. Like many of the women it depicts, its overt lightness and playfulness can initially conceal is challenge to established norms. It should unsettle us all." @default.
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• W4310366592 date "2022-12-01" @default.
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• W4310366592 title "Introduction" @default.
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• W4310366592 doi "https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148168" @default.
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