Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya - Softcover

Meiu, George Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226830586 ISBN 13: 9780226830582

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2023

Synopsis

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, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers 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 various imagined threats to intimate life. 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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226830586
• ISBN 13: 9780226830582
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238