Why should rumors ruin your career? Anti-Queer Panopticons and Popular Culture in Africa.

She came crying while pleading that she needed me to address the rumor. I told her there was no rumor to address, given that I canceled class and did not attend the lecture. Someone started a rumor that this young student who came crying wanted everyone to miss class but herself to earn points for attendance alone. When I canceled my class on that sad day in January 2016 because I lost one of my cousins, students still showed up because they said if rapture had taken place, Ms. Popoola would have had permission from God to teach her class before she joined the heavenly parade. The story of how I sorted this rumor and found the rumor Munger will be in my 2090 memoir.

I constantly vacillated about approaching rumors until I read Louise White's book Speaking with Vampires in a graduate seminar class. It was my first engagement with scholarly research that showed that rumors can offer insight into people's fear, anxiety, and even curiosity. Rumors can be malevolent or benevolent, depending on a multiplicity of factors.

Part of the framing questions for my presentation at the Lagos Studies Association (LSA) sponsored panel at ASA in San Francisco in November 2023 was: Why should rumor of alternate sexual identity ruin your life and induce anxiety, requiring you to explain and gibberish communication to allay the fears of the public otherwise? Why should the accusation of non-conformist sexual identity be a tool for character defamation, assassination, and cancel culture? Why do celebrities care about public perception of their sexual identity? How do they respond to these rumors and allegations?

Within Nigerian digital and popular culture, celebrities and public figures fear this allegation or rumor that many sometimes have resolved to hypermasculinity and femininity to allay public fear of alternate sexuality or what I have termed Anti-Queer panopticism/panopticon.

Anti-Queer panopticon is the surveillance and policing of public figures and individuals for gender conformity and punishment of those gender-non-conformist and gender-bending individuals. An Anti-Queer panopticism is a "vigilante" attitude or self-regulation towards any deviations from the idealized portrayal of femininity, maturity, manhood, and womanhood in terms of attire, demeanor, and mannerism; individuals who defy these expectations face harsh treatment from online culture, critics, and sensationalism.

While there is expanding scholarship on the representation of LGBTQI+ in film and literature, alongside a growing body of memoirs, part of my research is understanding lived experiences of Queer Africans.

My paper this year at the LSA panel at ASA in Chicago is titled "Queering Nigerian Popular Music: Temmie Ovwasa Sonic and Visual Transgressive Act," which furthers what I presented last year titled, "Alex is not gay! Homophobia, Counter-Sexuality Praxis and Celebrity Culture in Nigeria."

In the meantime, consider my review of Lindsey Green-Simm's book, Queer African Cinema, now published in Africa Today 70 (4) p.107-109

Posted on Facebook on  July 6, 2024

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