Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction To Make Things Perfectly Queer
- 1 Anthropological Wormholes From Pederasts to Female Husbands
- 2 The Text that Dare not Speak its Name Forging Male Colonial Intimacies
- 3 The School for Scandal Missionary Positions & African Sexual Initiations
- 4 The Stuff of Desire Boarding School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
- 5 Apartheid, Queerness & Diaspora
- 6 Male & Female Mythologies
- Conclusion Trans Africa
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
4 - The Stuff of Desire Boarding School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction To Make Things Perfectly Queer
- 1 Anthropological Wormholes From Pederasts to Female Husbands
- 2 The Text that Dare not Speak its Name Forging Male Colonial Intimacies
- 3 The School for Scandal Missionary Positions & African Sexual Initiations
- 4 The Stuff of Desire Boarding School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
- 5 Apartheid, Queerness & Diaspora
- 6 Male & Female Mythologies
- Conclusion Trans Africa
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, I outline the evolutionary stages in writing about female same-sex desire. Tentatively at first and then with increased candour, the women writers under scrutiny encode in their texts the pleasures derived from these relationships and shared between consenting partners in oppressive cultural contexts, which hold that lesbianism is alien to Africa. The authors' excavation of such pleasures is wrought, however, tentatively and with ontological insecurity, and is marked, in two instances (African and diasporic) by the Gothic mode.
I first examine implicit ‘queer’ gesturing by African women novelists as of the 1970s, starting with, among others, Selina's seduction of Gaciru in Kenyan Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool (1975) and Marija's pass at Sissie in the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy (1977) to then consider the increased confidence with which women writers assert same-sex desire in fiction while that desire is repressed in their societies, be it Kenya, Ghana or Nigeria. I therefore also examine fiction spanning the 1990s, such as that of Nigerian writers Unoma Azuah, Lola Shoneyin, and Temilola Abioye, and the 2010s with the Nigerian-born, British-based novelist Helen Oyeyemi, whose Witch is for Witching (2009) returns us to the early Gothicism of Rebeka Njau, albeit in a diasporic, British setting. In these later novels and other fiction pieces, I point to scenes that entangle the exotic and the erotic and deploy the rhetoric of seduction.
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- Out in AfricaSame-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Cultures, pp. 125 - 159Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013