Overview

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.

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9780226830582

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Reviews

“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 *

Author Information

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.

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