Knowing Women is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. Paying close attention to the women's practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as 'knowing women' in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Finalist, 2022 Best Book Award, African Studies Association

Winner, 2022 Ruth Benedict Book Prize, Outstanding Single Authored Monograph, The Association for Queer Anthology

Winner, 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles

‘This remarkable book deserves a wide audience … Theoretically subtle and accessible and beautifully written … Highly recommended.’

C. Higgs Source: Choice Magazine

‘The book’s rich ethnographic account adds to the life accounts of queer Africans emerging in the form of memoirs, autobiographical accounts, and documentaries. Also, the book centers the unruliness of sexuality outside how it has been constructed historically by religion and medicine. The five-chapter book, with an introduction and conclusion, uses a multidisciplinary approach that emphasizes friendship rather than sexuality to trouble ideas of gender, kinship, and same-sex desire in Ghana while accounting for ways that they overlap and detour from those of Europe and North America.’

Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola Source: PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review