Gay

Revisiting Homophobia in Times of Solidarity, Identity and Visibility in Uganda

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Prince Karakire, GUMA, Researcher and Director, Social Economic Research and Development, Uganda

Abstract

There is an apparent deepening in anxieties of the increasing rapid social change in Uganda, with the escalation of homophobia, if not more so. Homosexuals in their quest for solidarity and visibility have increasingly become victims of homophobic violence. In this study, I draw upon critical studies in geography, urban sociology, feminism, anthropology, Queer theories, and identity politics, to poignantly axamine manifestations of homophobia in the context of changing social structures. For this purpose, I adopt a multi-sited ethnography and hybrid genre of discourse analysis.

Introduction

There is an apparent deepening of anxiety in relation to the subject of homosexuality in Uganda. Despite anthropological narratives of African culture’s zero tolerance to homophobia, (see, Mutua, 2011; Epprecht, 2004; Murray, 1998, etc), itsintensificationandsolidification has not only had dire consequences for the homosexual community, it is a matter of curiosity. This curious trend, it ought to be mentioned, has emerged at the same time that as gay visibility are increasingly beginning to emerge and obscure the traditional same-sex behaviours, where homosexuals are continuously stepping away from the typically African gender-stratified systems that have long characterized same-sex relations between men. Consequently, gay men in their quest to sexually construct themselves have increasingly become affected by society’s aggressive compulsion to denigrate gay visibility.

And yet, a bulk of the body of work on homosexuality and homophobia persistently revolves around traditional explanations for contemporary homophobia. A few other studies either tend to disclose homophobia toward the gay communities (see, for instance, Kaoma, 2009), or merely explicate the difficulties gay men face while attempting to live the lives they feel they ought to be living. For instance, some studies on homophobia in Uganda mostly adopt a reductionist perspective often reducing homophobia to nothing more than a product oftraditional attitudes and values (Chi-Chi and Kabwe, 2008; Epprecht, 2001), the American Christian Right (Kaoma 2009), and the colonial entrenchment of homophobic laws (Sanders, 2009; Epprecht, 2004). And yet such narratives are not only inappropriate as they serve to conflate the agency of the African leaders and ordinary people who engage in homophobia and homophobic practices, they also reinforce streotypical ideas, and fail to offer consistent answers for the apparent growth of political and public expedience and intensification of homophobic practices.

Besides, contemporary homophobia is simply too complex to be reduced to a few ‘historical’ underlying factors such as culture, religion, or a simple binary opposition between the religious right and advocates of feminism and/or secularism. Consequently, homophobic effects of homosexual visibility and solidarity ought to be explored. It is the aim of this study therefore to constitute the conflicts and dynamics between homophobia andwesternnotionsof (homo)sexuality within global contexts. In the sections that follow, I draw upon critical studies in geography, urban sociology, feminism, anthropology, queer theories, and identity politics, to poignantly axamine manifestations of homophobia in the context of changing social structures. The subsequent section explores literature to revisiting homophobia in modern times…Access Full Text of the Article


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Communal Tensions: Homosexuality in Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend

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Oliver Ross, Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK

Introduction

“A speechless Yudi welcomed his Milya with open arms. He wasn’t at all bitter about the manner in which Milya had dumped him. He was too old for self-respect, and too much in love. Tears flowed down his cheeks. His heart was full of gratitude and joy, so that when his prodigal lover complained about how long he had walked, Yudi sat the boy down and knelt before him to massage his chapped and weary feet.

From the far end of the room, two pairs of eyes watched Yudi risk rebirth as a shit-worm by touching the feet of a Bhangi. The eyes belonged to Gauri.” (Rao, 2003, p.226-227)

In this scene from Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend, Yudi, the well-educated and affluent Brahmin protagonist, is welcoming back his Dalit lover, Milind, after a prolonged separation. There appears to be an inversion of the inequities of power when romantic relationships straddle differences in age, class and caste, but the tone is not celebratory. Implicit in the hyperbolic description of Yudi’s “speechless” reaction of “joy” and “tears” is a critique of his servility, refracted through the eyes of the ostensibly liberal but ultimately conservative Gauri. The Boyfriend presents Yudi’s Brahminism as one of the ineluctable constituents of identity which coexist and overlap with his self-consciously Westernised homosexual orientation and preclude its ideal embodiment.In addition to spotlighting the Brahmin/Dalit divide, Rao polarises Yudi and Milind by insisting that the former self-identifies as “radically gay”, while the latter falls below the radar of Anglophone identity politics (p.193). Even when the two men are sexually or romantically united, they are separated by the ideological differences embedded in their class and caste, a leitmotif which contributes to Rao’s depiction of Yudi’s more general social alienation.In this article I argue that inThe Boyfriend, dubbed a ‘cult classic’ by readers and scholars alike, Rao hints at an essentialist, sacrosanct homosexuality which has the potential to unite men who love and have sex with men as a result of their shared abjection. In practice, however, gay identity intersects with and is exposed to the deleterious effects of other identity markers like class, caste and religion, and Rao presents this social determinism in apessimistic tone which occasionally borders on nihilism. Subsequently, I show how he aligns homosexuality with wider debates on religious communalism and nationhood in order to centralise its importance and emphasise the function of his novel as irreverent social critique.

   A lecturer in English at the University of Pune, Raj Rao wrote his doctoral dissertation at Bombay University on the poems of Nissim Ezekiel. While his poetry is similarly conversational, he is distanced from his mentor by his scatological diction and sexual voyeurism, which Hoshang Merchant (2009) describes as “tearing the veils of linguistic gentility” (p.166). At Pune Rao has inaugurated courses in gay literature and queer studies, but, despite his self-identification as gay, homosexual or queer, his writing makes clear that he acknowledges the contingency of these terms and is attentive to the numerous alternative identity markers available in India.In The Boyfriend and his 2010 novel Hostel Room 131 he adduces bothLGBT movements and longer-standing non-normative South Asian sexual and gender identities like those of the hijra and kothi.

In his introduction to Whistling in the Dark (2009), Rao makes explicit his mobilisation of the signifier ‘gay’ in the name of activism, and this strategic deployment has a correlative in his interest in queer politics. What he calls “the intrinsic quality of resistance built into queerness” (p.xv) echoes the idealism surrounding the term as it was co-opted by queer theory in the Anglo-American academic establishment of the early 1990s, in the wake of the formation of the anti-homophobic umbrella group Queer Nation in New York. Andrew Grossman (2001) dubs Rao a “radical utopian” (p.299); present in much of his academic and creative writing on queer themes, this stance is particularly salient in the introduction to Whistling in the Dark, where he analyses Foucault’s oft-cited remark on the normalisation of homosexuality as an identity category…Access Full Text of the Article


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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

The Homosexual as Pariah: Thinking about Homosexual Existence in the Context of Evangelical Christianity in the 1960’s

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Taylor Cade West, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Abstract

 In the 1960’s some American homosexuals began to speak; they worked to establish a dialogue between themselves and a society from which they were excluded. Evangelical Christians first followed the societal pattern of silence in regards to homosexuality. Later, as the clamor and presence of homosexuals increased, many evangelicals reacted pointedly. The historical coming out of homosexuals and evangelicals’ response, as it is documented in the pages of Christianity Today, serves as a supreme example of the pariah condition that many homosexuals and queer people were experiencing in the 1960s and continue perforce to experience today. It is the purpose of this paper to think about, in the context of evangelical Christianity’s reaction to homosexuality, the homosexual as pariah; to explore the character of a marginal existence.

 It is perplexing to live in a society of which one is not a part (as is the case of queer peoples in so many parts of the world). Where silence reigns, where speaking is a forbidden act, one very often will stumble through the world beclouded by a haze. There is no guide for the perplexed, very seldom does a hand reach through the mist and escort a person to a ground upon which one may speak, one may be. Seldom, if ever, does a whisper break the darkness of one’s insecurity and say, “Go elsewhere. Here you have no place.”

The act of the “Homosexual as Pariah” has not come to a close. Still, well into the twenty-first century, a queer person may be born into a family in the presence of which she may never be herself. A homosexual may live in a society from which he is excluded and at times violently oppressed. And as many gains are being made as far as political and social freedoms in some parts of the world, some states are attempting to restore laws that prevent homosexual activity, the meaning of which is a grotesque violation of the private realm of human beings; and other states have enacted legislation which equates public expression of homosexuality as a kind of “horror-propaganda” against a regime already sunk in a morass of civil rights violations.

Universally speaking, the homosexual—along with all queer peoples—is subject to an imperiled existence and it is in this context of simultaneously expanding and contracting freedom that we must contemplate what it means to be a homosexual or queer person in society. The purpose of this paper does not go beyond an attempt to understand.

In our endeavor to understand, it seems appropriate to fall back on the historical example of evangelical Christianity’s reaction to homosexuals as they began to speak out in 1960s America; through this moment in gay history, we may begin to see the quality of homosexual existence in society. In so doing, we will find that the worldview of those who are members of society is diametrically opposed to the reality of those who find themselves at society’s margins. It will also become clear that the price of assimilation into decent society is nothing less than existence itself. And lastly, we shall attempt to discover a possible alternative that is open to the pariah…Access Full Text of the Article


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The Politics of Global Gay Identity: Towards a Universal History

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Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract

Through the years, the LGBT community has established a universal network of social relations for homosexual people, defying social, cultural and political borders. What is promoted is a global community that shares a common historical past and an array of invented/established traditions that venerates it. Historically, the LGBT community has valorized the Stonewall riots of 1969 as the nodal point of gay and lesbian politicization and June has been set up as the month of LGBT Pride in order to keep the memory of homosexual revolution and liberation alive. Yet, the Stonewall riots along with the impulse of the LGBT movement and its subsequent traditions have been defined as solely Western practices that predominantly derive from the American experience of the incidents, thus excluding non-Western perspectives. Furthermore, the ideal global community often requires a common, unified identity based on codes and symbols of LGBT history. In my paper, I would argue that the politics of the gay community, despite its Western-oriented milieu, have managed to promote and affirm a universal gay identity through invented traditions in order to provide a “home,” to project an imagined community that evades cultural, social, and racial frontiers, but above all to make this idea of “home” an available option.

Perceiving the world as a global village where cultures converge and information is freely shared has been contested. Indeed, the conundrums posed from the effect of globalization have redefined this idea of the global village and nations have turned to set up physical and cultural barriers again in order to protect their own cultural heritage from external corruption. Glocalization is now forwarded as the ideological discourse that moves towards supporting ethnic distinctiveness, yet does not completely obstruct intercultural exchanges. Nevertheless, it is still hard for people to shake off the remnants of globalization and the need to belong in the vast global village is still prevalent. This sense of belonging, as inextricably tied to bonds within communities – where one “feels at home” – is an idea based on and solidified by common experiences between groups of people. The LGBT community – or simply gay community – stands paradigmatic to the realization of this idea, hence promoting a universal history for the formation of a global identity. Seeing the 1969 Stonewall riots as the nodal point of the gay and lesbian movement, the history of LGBT culture has been rendered universal, thus embracing social, political, cultural and racial diversity through practices of established traditions and codes. However, the Western impulse in the historicity of the culture is hard to miss, a matter that has instigated sociological and academic debates in defense of non-Western cultures threatened by homogenization. In this paper, I would argue that the politics of the gay community, despite its Western-oriented milieu, has managed to promote and affirm a universal gay identity through invented traditions in order to provide a “home,” to project an imagined community that evades cultural, social, and racial frontiers, but above all to make this idea of “home” an available option…Access Full Text of the Article


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