“Alex is not gay!”
In that voice which can be the characteristic tone of adults in Nigeria that may be a mark of conviction or condemnation, she said to the interviewer, “I told you Alex is not gay; it is not in our family.” One can write a book-length manuscript to unpack this sentence. This comment and interview came on the heels of a relationship break-up between a male celebrity named Alex Ekubo and his ex-fiance. For scholars of subaltern sexual histories, the social media trial of Alex in the court of public opinion calls to mind a different but slightly similar historical trial of Oscar Wilde in British media.
My presentation at the LSA-sponsored panel at ASA in San Francisco last year picks its title from this incident yet transcends this case to interrogate the collision of sexual anxieties and celebrity culture in Nigeria. Given the brevity of time for presentation, I dispensed with the history of the production of knowledge on subaltern sexualities, specifically queer, to focus on how digital culture and its proclivity for 24 news cycles, sensations, and controversies exacerbates homophobia in Nigeria.
Some of the questions that animated my talk were: Why do celebrities care about public perception of their sexual identity? Why are allegations, counter-allegations, and anxieties of alternate sexual identity rife in Nigerian celebrity culture? What are the counter-sexualities practices of celebrities? Particularly how do queer celebrities respond to heteronormativity?
My presentation takes a detour from cinematic and literary accounts of queer lives to lived experiences and media stories. I extend and complicate Saheed Aderinto’s idea of “racialized sexual otherness” and extend Nichola Mizoeff’s idea of visuality to sexuality to examine how celebrities respond to heteronormativity as a form of visuality that established norms, images, and authority on “normal” sexual relation.
In my presentation, I argued that heteronormativity is a form of visuality that seeks to regulate and control sexual relations according to heterosexual-patriarchal vision. Thus, I explore how heteronormativity as a form of visuality is challenged and affirmed by celebrities by deploying Paul Preciado’s idea of counter-sexuality practice. While my presentation is indebted to these scholars, my engagement with their works honors, critiques, and rejects some of their assumptions.
This is still a work in progress. This presentation is a broader part of an extensive research I hope will evolve in phases to explore pleasure, erotic, and intimacies, which are both sexual and non-sexual. Simply it is part of my interest in Queer African studies.
Specifically, in this publication, I review Serena Owusua Dankwa’s Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana. One of the book’s many significant contributions are its departure from using homogenized global sexual rights framework, which sometimes exists in tension and converges with local realities. I also think the book does a great job of examining cultural specificities, spatiality, and dynamics of same-sex desiring women in culturally sensitive ways to language, kinship, and friendship.
My review, coming on the heels of Ghana’s attempt at criminalizing queer lives, indicates law as a tool of discipline and governmentality, as Foucault tells us.
There is still more to come in this regard. Fingers crossed!
In the meantime, see my extended review for Political and Legal Anthropological Review in the link below.
https://polarjournal.org/.../knowing-women-same-sex.../
Posted on Facebook on March 14, 2024
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