Introduction
This article is about science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter. It takes as its starting point a report released at the seventh South African AIDS conference in 2015 by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The document – Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa (ASSAf 2015) – was released at a time when news from Uganda, Kenya and other African nations was re-animating global and continental concerns about ‘African homophobia’, a trope that has received considerable criticism in African studies over the past decade (e.g. Awondo etal. Reference Awondo, Geschiere and Reid2012; Biruk Reference Biruk2014; Coly Reference Coly2013; Thoreson Reference Thoreson2014). The ASSAf report mobilizes scientific knowledge in order to change the policies of African nations outside South Africa, raising a set of questions that are as relevant to science and technology studies (STS) in Africa as they are to the study of queer politics and sexual citizenship. I begin by describing the context in which this policy document arose and the many, often conflicting, pressures that shaped the final product. Such context goes some way in explaining some of the stranger features of the document as it balances demands from donors and governments in the global North with commitments to continental solidarity and South African activists. Although it relies heavily on the authority of science to do its convincing, the report also evinces the postcolonial predicaments of scientisticFootnote 1 discourse, paradoxically hedging science’s authority in order to bolster the report’s credibility.
These dynamics account for how the ‘performance’ of authority, legitimacy and credibility – so crucial to the work of national academies of science in particular (Hilgartner Reference Hilgartner2000) and of public-facing research more generally (e.g. Epstein Reference Epstein1996) – differs from accounts of scientific expert advisers in the global North. In the rich and growing body of work in STS in Africa, scantFootnote 2 attention has been paid to African national academies of science, science advisers, or the use of scientific knowledge in rights advocacy. This article contributes a case study pertinent to those topics, but also an example of science intervening in intracontinental politics while still entangled in the postcolonial politics that frame the majority of STS in Africa. Studies of sexuality and development – and especially of public health interventions – have documented how scientific knowledge and people come into contact to yield new subjects, with new understandings of themselves, of morality, and of their relationships to other people and institutions (e.g. Pigg and Adams Reference Pigg, Adams, Adams and Pigg2005). Although I do not document science and sexuality in development practice, this piece does address how sexual citizenship is imagined.
I take inspiration from STS in reading for the ‘co-production’ of science and society. Co-production is an ‘idiom’ (Jasanoff Reference Jasanoff and Jasanoff2004: 3) that calls attention to how ‘modes of making knowledge about the world are also simultaneously and reciprocally modes of making social order’ (Hilgartner etal. Reference Hilgartner, Miller, Hagendijk, Hilgartner, Miller and Hagendijk2015: 4–5). As the arbiter of key ontological distinctions, science’s role in the constitution of power is on full display in documents such as the ASSAf report that make claims to rights on the basis of science. ASSAf president Daya Reddy, in his foreword to the report, hopes ‘that this report will be widely disseminated on the continent and beyond, and that the findings and recommendations will inform policymakers’ (ASSAf 2015: 6). Insofar as the report seeks to influence the future, here ‘co-production’ is not an idiom to explain the growth of science and society alongside one another, but a kind of aspirant worldmaking that, like all aspirations, may be as prone to failure as to success.
It is to how and, crucially, whether this document influences the future that I turn in the following sections. The question of ‘whether’ hinges on the success or failure of the report to conjure a public. If the co-productive interdependency of science and social order is a hallmark of modernity, so too is the reflexive public. Both reveal the paradoxes and challenges of modern governance. As developed in literary criticism and queer theory, a public is a collective that ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’ (Warner Reference Warner2002: 67, emphasis in the original).Footnote 3 The publics of texts are recruited not only through the capacity for public discourse to ‘make sense’ or to convince with content and reason, but also through ‘poetic world-making’ (ibid.: 82). A text specifies ‘in advance … the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims – of the kind that can be said to be oriented to understanding – but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on’ (ibid.: 114). Publics rely on individuals recognizing ‘themselves only as already being the person they are addressed as being, and as already belonging to the world that is condensed in their discourse’ (ibid.: 114). The conscious effort to mobilize a public, like future-oriented co-production, is another kind of aspirant worldmaking, as prone to failure as to success.
Who are meant to recognize themselves in the ASSAf report? And in what kind of world do they already see themselves existing? After explaining the political context, I describe the elite African public implied in the report, paying particular attention to the presumption of its ethical commitments, criteria of self-evaluation and modes of credibility. The report displays an unusually self-aware kind of co-production: a heightened, anxious self-consciousness about how scientists should address the public. Following that, I describe the picture of sexual citizenship implicit in the report and how it relates rights-bearing subjects to the body politic. Science is depicted as the arbiter of choice and choicelessness. Whether one chooses one’s ‘deviant’ proclivities or is a non-choosing product of innate nature is a crucial distinction in deciding what kinds of behaviours can be tolerated and what kinds of people can be enfranchised in modern liberal democracies. Tied to this question is the fate of the sexual minorities who seek political recognition.
In my concluding section I turn to the success of the report. Curiously for a national academy of sciences, the ASSAf report provides unsolicited expert advice to countries other than the one the academy was created to serve, making the scale of its operation analytically unwieldy. Several years since the report’s publication and circulation, it is difficult to evaluate empirically how government policy on the continent has changed in general, letalone as a result of this report. Just since the 2015 release, legislative victories in Angola and Botswana have been offset by further criminalization in Chad and Gabon (although the latter reversed its decision shortly afterwards). Moreover, what is and is not a result of the report is difficult to tell amid various efforts by different actors, operating at multiple scales, and taking myriad approaches to influence the course of queer politics in Africa.
It is nearly impossible to assess the success or failure of such a text. I thus take a more speculative approach, presenting a set of potential confounders that might vex the assembly of the text’s intended public, reasons to suspect that the report – and the science-based approach to rights advocacy that it stands in for – may not have the effects the authors intended. As modes of aspirant worldmaking, both co-production and the assembly of publics rely to some extent on a shared ontological and metaphysical agreement – between science and social order on the one hand, and between text and inchoate public on the other – in order to make the future. I ask what reason we might have to doubt the exactness of agreement.
The point of subjecting the ASSAf report to scrutiny is not to render it impotent by critique, nor to discourage future attempts at using scientific knowledge in the service of emancipatory queer politics; critique, after all, is not synonymous with criticism. Several authors of the report are former colleagues, and we share the aim of finding for people who desire them and are denied them recognition through rights and the alleviation of discrimination. In the spirit of reflexive activism, I consider the limits and consequences of this attempt to change public policy, how it establishes legitimacy and characterizes social belonging, with a view to improving future attempts at ushering in a more just world.
Science and the politics of homophobia
Let me return to the role science – or, rather, scientistic discourse – played in the mid-2010s politics of homophobia. In February 2014, President Yoweri Museveni signed into law the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act (nicknamed the ‘Kill the Gays Bill’ by some commentators) that had been passed by that country’s parliament towards the end of the previous year. The beginning of 2014 also saw Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan sign into law the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. Widely publicized in Western media, these attempts to persecute homosexuality (beyond the vestigial colonial anti-sodomy laws that linger in many African legal codes), coupled with contemporary bouts of unrest around homosexuality in the Gambia, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Malawi, drew global attention.
From the start, the language of science surrounded the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act. Scott Lively, the American evangelical considered to have incited Ugandan lawmakers to develop the bill, mixed religious and moral rhetoric with claims about biology and health in talks he gave in the country. In a video of one of the lectures, he tells the audience that he is addressing the topic ‘wearing two different hats’, speaking to them ‘as a pastor, with a degree in theology’, and ‘as an attorney, who has training in secular reasoning’.Footnote 4 ‘It’s easy to wear both hats,’ he claims. ‘There is no contradiction between science and Christianity because they come to the exact same conclusions when you look at the facts.’ Throughout the three hour-long lecture – more a ‘how to’ guide for proselytizing homophobia – Lively commands religion and theological reasoning on the one hand, and science and secular reasoning on the other, to discredit the ‘born this way’ science and question the integrity of its scientists, who are depicted as the high priests of a global anti-family, leftist, Nazi cabal, while also presenting damning aetiologies of homosexuality packaged as developmental biology. Notably, the cure for homosexuality is not prayer – although prayer wouldn’t hurt – but a secular, psychology-informed conversion therapy.
Although deeply religious and nationalist, proponents of the ‘Kill the Gays Bill’ were similarly invested in scientific authority. Religion and science are both, after all, sources of socially authoritative ontological and metaphysical distinctions, important arbiters between the natural and its other, whether that be the contranatural, artificial, synthetic, cultural, or something else. Before the Ugandan parliament was to vote on the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the government requested that the Ugandan National Academy of Sciences (UNAS) write a report appraising the scientific evidence concerning the causes of homosexuality, which UNAS declined to do for lack of sufficient time (Nordling Reference Nordling2015). The law was passed by parliament without quorum, which led to its ultimate dismissal on procedural grounds after review by the Constitutional Court of Uganda. Before the bill was struck down, however, Museveni had to decide whether to sign it into law. In a letter to parliament, Museveni was reluctant to sign the legislation, claiming that he did not want to punish those who are ‘born abnormal’ with innate homosexuality; rather, he was interested in protecting those who are recruited into homosexuality for ‘mercenary reasons’.Footnote 5 The government put together a small group of scientists to write the report that UNAS had declined to prepare. The report was misquoted – to the chagrin of many of the scientists involved, who had summarized in good faith the scientific consensus – as having established that homosexuality was a learned behaviour (Balter Reference Balter2014; Wayengera Reference Wayengera2014; De Waal Reference De Waal2014).
Some Western donors, including the USA, Norway and Sweden, cut aid to Uganda, but to little effect (Brydum Reference Brydum2014). Aid conditionality emboldened nationalist anti-colonial sentiments, with one government official characterizing it as ‘blackmail’ threatening a ‘sovereign country’ (Butty Reference Butty2014).Footnote 6
Seen as a beacon of lightFootnote 7 amidst the dark continent’s homophobia, the South African government was pressured by the international community and civil society activistsFootnote 8 in South Africa – of whom I was oneFootnote 9 at the time of the report’s publication – to intervene. In consultations with us, the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) doubled down on what it had previously communicated in response to earlier, similar pressure: it ‘finds it difficult to support the approach and practice of some States of publicly “naming and shaming” countries’, opting instead to handle the situation ‘through constructive dialogue bilaterally and within the context of the work of the African Union’ (DIRCO 2012).
It is unclear whether there is a relationship between the ASSAf report and the DIRCO diplomatic strategy regarding homophobia on the continent, but the report was a direct response to the Ugandan scientific panel, and was done in collaboration with UNAS.Footnote 10 UNAS president Nelson Sewankambo justified his cooperation by noting that the role of UNAS is to engage with controversial issues, especially where scientific arguments are being used, even though his colleagues may not agree with his views (Nordling Reference Nordling2015). According to some of those involved, ASSAf approval turned out to be somewhat contested, even though it was eventually successfully funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the African Science Academy Development Initiative, a programme of the US National Academy of Sciences established in 2004 with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant. Although controversy and resolution are rightly the object of analysis for many STS scholars, they are not the focus of the present discussion. They do, however, indicate the complex political milieux in which the document originates and which it tries to address.
An objectivity for African publics
Paul Semugoma, a gay Ugandan physician and activist, told a reporter: ‘As an activist, I plan to get hold of [the ASSAf report], and use it akin to how they use the Bible on us’ (Nordling Reference Nordling2015: 136). Not long after coming out in a speech at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington DC, Semugoma left Uganda for South Africa, afraid of what might befall him amid intensifying homophobia in his home country. In 2014, when local activists intervened to prevent his deportation, the South African government’s commitment to combatting homophobia and accepting refugees came under question (Kings Reference Kings2014). Semugoma’s statement directly comments on the use of religion to marginalize LGBTIFootnote 11 people. Yet it also reaches for a secular article of faith, a document with the epistemic authority of scripture.
In contrast to the studied impersonality of the scientific journal article, the ASSAf report bears all the hallmarks of the documents created by and circulated among governments, NGOs, development agencies, funders, multilateral international organizations, and so on: flamboyant and colourful graphic design suggestive of the report’s content; the biographies and credentials of the expert panel members; seals and logos of the report’s creators; a foreword from a prominent scientist; and an executive summary (cf. Hilgartner Reference Hilgartner2000). In these superficial gestures as well as in its discourse, the report performs authority, impartiality and objectivity.
But that objectivity is a qualified one. In public science, how objectivity is performed varies across time and space. Comparative studies of science advisers and regulatory science in the global North describe, for example, a uniquely American ‘view from nowhere’ objectivity achieved by alienating experts from their recommendations, contra a British and German ‘view from everywhere’ objectivity relying on the personal authority of experts and their consensus (Jasanoff Reference Jasanoff, Camic, Gross and Lamont2011).Footnote 12 The ASSAf report performs a qualified objectivity that responds to political and epistemological conditions in Africa and the global South more generally. But this is not, to be sure, taking an African standpoint in the tradition of standpoint theory.Footnote 13 Although the report shares with standpoint theory an appreciation of diverse, culturally specific ways of knowing and being, as well as a critical outlook on the inadequacies and even violence of top-down received colonial science, it does not try to establish an authoritative ‘view from Africa’. Rather, the ASSAf report pre-empts postcolonial critiques of science, rendering science as fallible in order, ultimately, to bolster its authority as a universal and dispassionate enterprise.
In the foreword we are told that the report uses ‘the traditional Academy consensus study methodology in which a panel of experts, guided by the panel chair, undertakes the study on a voluntary basis. The advantage of this multi-perspective approach is that it is free of partisan interest’ (ASSAf 2015: 6). A fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences commented in an article about the report: ‘every academy … must jealously guard its non-partisan reputation in order to be taken seriously … academies of science would risk their reputations, and mortgage their influence with governments of any persuasion, were they to go down the track of fighting irrational fear with emotive appeals’ (Graves Reference Graves2015). Although decidedly non-partisan by virtue of incorporating several perspectives, the report goes out of its way to make sure that the reader knows that the global South is included in the consensus on which it draws.
While discussing declarations of scientific consensus, the authors note that the Royal College of Psychiatrists established that there is no evidence to suggest that early childhood experiences are involved in the development of homosexuality, and that the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1990, as have ‘[m]edical associations and scientific bodies throughout the world … [including m]ost major organisations of health professionals in the global North … and many organisations in the global South’, including the Psychological Association of the Philippines and the Hong Kong Psychological Society (ASSAf 2015: 16–17). That there is no psychopathology related to same-sex sexual orientations ‘has become the consensus position of mainstream mental health professionals (and their organising bodies) in well over 100 countries across the world’ (ibid.: 49). Since the 1970s:
dozens of national and international bodies … in countries as diverse as Argentina, Uruguay, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Philippines, Denmark, Brazil, France, New Zealand, the USA and UK confirmed that same-sex or bisexual orientation is a normal part of human sexual variety and that same-sex orientation does not connote any psychological impairment nor any inability in social or work life nor any threat to other lifestyles or persons. (ASSAf 2015: 59)
The report insists repeatedly that it is in line with authorities in the global South, pre-empting accusations of relying on global North consensus.
Although the report is an ‘unvarnished’ (Nature 2015) account of the science, the science is nonetheless fallible. Discussing a neurohormonal basis for variation in human sexuality, the report notes: ‘As is normal with scientific endeavour [progress] has not been linear; there have been null results, non-replication of key studies, refinement of core tenets of theory, and some new sub-hypotheses in response to evidence’ (ASSAf 2015: 38). Despite science’s fallibility, the authors write that ‘there is no longer any doubt’ and ‘greater certainty’ that past ideas about there being no biological basis for same-sex sexual orientation have been ‘debunked’ and ‘have no scientific validity’ (ibid.: 32–4). Rendering science as ever-changing is a way, paradoxically, of strengthening its claims. The modesty of the method renders the knowledge it produces more authoritative because the method is progressive and self-correcting.
For Africans, we are told, such methodological humility is important to stress, especially as science was used to justify all manner of violence: ‘Colonial regimes in Africa and other parts of the world, and the apartheid regime in South Africa, for example, made sexual relationships and marriage across what they called “race-lines” illegal … [justifying] those laws with arguments that such “cross-colour” sex was “unnatural” and a hazard to public health’ (ASSAf 2015: 21). In an interview, the report’s author told me: ‘Although we as Africans have embraced recent race science, it’s important to say that the science was wrong on race, which unleashed slavery and racism and colonialism. Science corrected itself.’Footnote 14 The report explicitly invokes past African experiences of discrimination justified by science in order, again, to legitimate science as a way of knowing the world that is self-correcting. After all, science was also used to combat racism: ‘Slavery, colonialism and apartheid, for example, have all relied on notions of white superiority and black inferiority, and all were challenged historically on scientific, as well as ethical and moral grounds’ (ibid.: 34).
Such linear, teleological histories of advancement alleviated the anxieties of the authors and other activists that the report would be written off as a Western import amid anti-colonial sentiment. ‘It had to be Africa-led,’ Glenda Gray, the panel co-chair told a reporter. ‘If it were American-led, African governments would say that it was Western propaganda’ (Nordling Reference Nordling2015: 136).
In a further move to distance itself from equations of science with white, Western influence, the report recounts a history of a precolonial Africa that was largely tolerant of variation in sexual orientation. ‘African societies across the continent historically were, with few exceptions, much more tolerant and accepting of non-normative sexualities and behaviours than those who colonised them’ (ASSAf 2015: 42). Nineteenth-century European views of appropriate sexual mores and morality, we are told, brought homophobia and homophobic legislation as well as injunctions against various traditional African customs having to do with sex and marriage. The report goes out of its way to note when Western scientists were wrong. ‘The origins of “recruitment” into homosexually [sic] as a set of ideas seem to stem from long-discredited (USA-based) research’ (ibid.: 53). Parentheticals like this one dot the paper, also attributing ideas about the curability of same-sex sexual orientation to American scientists (ibid.: 49). Africans, the victims of past scientific malfeasance, have the opportunity now to be morally and intellectually superior – as they were prior to colonization – to those in the West by refusing to be duped by discredited Western homophobic science.
The report’s author told me that every African MP would receive a copy of the report, and on my prompting described to me the public he imagined addressing. These policymakers were mostly men, fairly well educated and invested in contemporary cultural and scientific debates. They were a potentially hostile group, so the case against homophobia had to be made not only on the grounds of human rights abuses, but also on the possibility that it would be bad for society in general, both morally and in terms of public health. ‘Repeal these laws, and the bounty will be a big increase in the public health of your countries,’ he wanted the report to say.Footnote 15
In appealing to a scientifically minded, anti-colonial, critical African public, the report also places itself within a particular telos of modernity and development. Progressive sexual policies are connected with broader development goals, including public health and economic objectives.
There is reason for urgency too because … where new laws are passed and where the repression of LGBTI communities increases, there is evidence of a rapid onset of negative consequences not just for LGBTI persons and communities but also for societies as a whole [sic]. These include, but are not limited to:
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• the reversal of key public health gains, particularly in terms of HIV and AIDS and other sexual health programmes;
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• higher levels of social violence;
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• reduced economic growth;
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• diversion of attention from sexual and other violence against women and children. (ASSAf 2015: 23)
Explicit appeals are made to human rights, and particularly to the ‘Resolution on Protection against Violence and Other Human Rights Violations against Persons on the Basis of their Real or Imputed Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity’ passed by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2014.
Measures of collective well-being that are referenced here should, it is argued, be of particular interest to African leaders. Invoking (rather simplified) notions of ubuntu and relational African personhood, the authors write:
African lawmakers in particular are frequently concerned not only with individual human rights, but also with the well-being of communities. African communitarians have long held that all members of a community are to be considered, and consulted, in establishing what is best for the community. In believing that heterosexuality is the human default, and LGB persons are wilfully undermining it, however, lawmakers treat LGB citizens not as constituents to be consulted, but automatically as threats to the ‘natural’ functioning of communities. (ASSAf 2015: 21)
The scare quotes around ‘natural’ suggest that ‘LGB’ citizens are part of a naturally functioning community, contributors to collective well-being, even if they have not been understood in that way by recent African lawmakers.
LGBTI rights are thus hung on the value attributed to economic growth (cf. Murphy Reference Murphy2017), public health gains, and reduction of violence (particularly against women and children). It is no coincidence that these are all priorities for donors and funders, and are central to discourses of developmentalism. There is a sense in which all African nations are being adjudicated on their progress towards the telos of modernity, towards free-market and violence-free democracy, towards economic growth as reflected in GDP (the indicator used by the cited study), and towards attaining certain public health goals. That they are being so adjudicated was stated in so many words by an Australian commentator on the report: ‘Uganda was once considered a regional leader in HIV prevention’ (Fileborn etal. Reference Fileborn, Lyons and Power2015, emphasis added). As a result of increasingly morally conservative approaches to public health, however, it is no longer.
What public does the report see itself addressing? These Africans are scientifically literate, or at least share an appreciation for scientistic objectivity; they are nonetheless proudly African and see how science affirms that even if it has not always done so; and they share an orientation to governance that recognizes in itself some communitarianism and a need to progressively approach a particular kind of modernity evinced in development metrics.
Choiceless citizens
The world that the report both describes and tries to usher in is one in which full citizenship is extended to sexual minorities. The way in which scientific knowledge depicts human nature and natural order has profound moral consequences. The ASSAf report, I show here, posits particular kinds of citizens who deserve rights based on their lack of choice in their sexuality, making them the legitimate subjects of a positive and beneficent biopower (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1978). But these choiceless citizens incur particular obligations as a condition of their inclusion. In studies of sexual citizenship, according to one of the concept’s prominent theorists (Richardson Reference Richardson2017), focusing on the autonomous (Western) subject’s right to choose presents several problems for the comparative analytical utility of sexual citizenship. Here, I focus on how sexual citizenship depends on depictions of choice in a very different way, one that underscores paternalistic care and collective well-being rather than individual agency.
The choosing subject who can be oriented one way or another is only legible within the liberal frame of a possessive rights-bearing subject, an individual who not only has the capacity to possess property but is also self-possessed, in control of their own will and intimacies. Such a notion of personhood was predicated on the unfreedom of various colonial subjects (Lowe Reference Lowe2015), but in a somewhat perverse way is also juxtaposed with the non-choosing subject described here. Our non-choosing subject is unfree in other ways: a victim of fate vulnerable to a more beneficent biopower by virtue of their unfreedom.
Crucial to how the rights and obligations of citizens are determined is the appraisal of choice. Discussions of sexuality, both homophobic and pro-queer, at least on the surface, are invested in the question of whether homosexuality is a choice. Museveni’s reluctance to punish those who are born ‘abnormal’, which drove him to commission the scientific reports discussed earlier, speaks to a general feature of liberal democracy in which choiceless victims of circumstance or of nature are legitimate recipients of state care, whereas the belonging and morality of choosing agents can be questioned. Establishing whether sexuality is chosen was a central aim of the ASSAf report. The sciences marshalled in the report, with the claims they make to arbitrate crucial metaphysical distinctions – biological/cultural, natural/unnatural – play a key role in appraisals of choice.
The sciences of the report are somewhat different from Michel Foucault’s scientia sexualis, which saw nineteenth-century psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and physicians, among others, inciting individual deviants to discourse through a secular confessional, typologizing abnormal sexualities so that a whole ‘sexual mosaic’ might be legible and controlled (Reference Foucault and Hurley1978: 47). Today’s investigators of sexuality are less interested in making and typologizing sexual degenerates and deviants, and more interested in describing a range of natural variants, moving moral judgement away from the normal/abnormal distinction:
Examining the biological factors, including genetic, neurohormonal and other factors, the report concludes that contemporary science does not support thinking about sexuality in a simple binary opposition of hetero/homosexual and normal/abnormal. Rather, it favours thinking in terms of a range of human variation, very little of which can justifiably be termed abnormal. As variation in sexual identities and orientations has always been part of a normal society, there can be no justification for attempts to ‘eliminate’ LGBTI from society. (ASSAf 2015: 10)
The choosing individual subject disappears in the science marshalled in the report in two ways: through moving inward past the skin that houses the ideal choosing autonomous subject, and through a zooming outward to the population level. Sexuality is no longer read through the confessional that brought into existence abnormal subjects as it came to define them and make them vulnerable to biopower. Although nineteenth-century scientists of sexuality posited biological and environmental aetiologies for abnormal sexuality, it was the confession of the subject that was the condition’s ultimate authenticator. But now, perhaps because sexuality and its typologies have become so taken-for-granted and naturalized a part of human experience in scientific inquiry, sexual orientation is made legible through technologies that do not require sexuality and subjectivity to emerge simultaneously. On the one hand sexuality is read as originating in the body – as in genes and hormones – and what can be seen as acting on the body – as in epi-marks and endocrine disruptors. On the other hand, for research done at the population scale, like public health, self-reported behaviour or self-identification suffice. Moreover, a move away from doctor-ascribed typology towards self-ascribed identity in the study of sexuality, alongside postcolonial critiques of Western-centric sexual ontologies, has led to an awareness among scientists of cultural variation in sexuality. Such variation is, however, still presented as different expressions of a nonetheless universal and innate condition: ‘Just as there are many ways to be heterosexual, there are many homosexualities, and many different identities within what has often incorrectly been seen as a monolithic gay or lesbian (or bisexual) identity or singular set of behaviours’ (ASSAf 2015: 32).
It is important not to overstate the point of biological determinism. ‘This is not to argue that because people feel they have no choice, sexual orientation “must be” a biological phenomenon at root,’ the report qualifies (ASSAf 2015: 35). ‘It is rather to ask that when research shows that most people feel they have no control over a trait or predisposition that causes no harm to themselves or to others, what right does any government have to insist on changes to, or the suppression of, that trait?’ (ibid.) On the one hand, this is a further illustration of the studied humility described in the previous section. But this passage also leads us to a major upshot of the choiceless sexual citizen: queer emancipation is hung here on the harmlessness of homosexuals, in addition to their capacity to contribute to better economic outcomes, to better public health, and to less violence.
Choiceless subjects may be emancipated through their capacity to contribute to a collective good by reading the lives of queer people in aggregate, but how their inclusion benefits society is largely a matter of framing and rhetoric. For example, one of the arguments the report puts forward follows these lines. Criminalization and stigma cause ‘minority stress’ among MSM (men who have sex with men), which in turn leads to poor HIV prevention practices that exacerbate the biophysical risks inherent in unprotected anal sex. Because many MSM are in practice having sex with both men and women – perhaps, it is suggested, because of social pressure to have sex with women – they also transmit HIV to the general population, countering public health goals. Thus, the state should decriminalize sexuality as well as invest in programmes that particularly address the health needs of LGBTI people. Viewed in aggregate, choiceless subjects cannot help but have a negative impact on public health given the repressive environment. They must thus come under the pastoral care of the state, which should extend to them not only rights, but also services tailored to them. As such, the citizens that emerge are made by the state and by a progressive social environment to contribute to public health gains.
It is important to make two things clear. First, I do not mean to suggest here that sexuality is a choice or is not experienced by many as innate. Rather, I have tried to track how rights-bearing subjects are rendered in this particular scientific claim for LGBTI emancipation and how the logics of inclusion, and expectations of responsibility, function. At any rate, the problem of choice in the report, and for us, ends up being not so much about whether individuals feel that they choose their sexuality, but about how the natural/unnatural and biological/cultural distinctions are encoded as distinctions between unchosen and chosen with particular moral consequences for citizenship.
Second, I also do not mean to suggest that we have somehow moved beyond the technologies of the confessional. Notably in the context of human rights work and development projects related to gender empowerment and public health, practitioners wielding technologies with embedded implicit scientific information make new sexual subjects and citizens, if not always in the ways they expect (see Pigg and Adams Reference Pigg, Adams, Adams and Pigg2005). But it is such phenomena that may be at the heart of the argument that homosexuality is unAfrican and that some scholars (e.g. Massad Reference Massad2007) have argued are evidence of neocolonial impositions that incite homophobia. It was not in the interest of this report to foreground confessional technologies, hence the move away from the choosing subject.
Potential confounders
Co-production and publics, if they are to create change, both require some not taken-for-granted relation of identity, recognition or agreement. Science – especially in its more activist expressions – may not always characterize society in a way that is recognizable to the members of a society; texts may not always include worlds to which readers understand themselves as already belonging. Aspirational documents such as this one ask for speculative methods of evaluation. It is at the crucial juncture of identification that I offer some brief thoughts on why the report may not have its intended effect. I do not attempt to characterize how the anticipated audience of the report understands the world. After all, the report attempts to reach across the diverse continent of Africa. Even if it didn’t, insofar as all publics exist only by virtue of address, trying to characterize a public prior to its assembly is a fool’s errand. Rather, I point more conservatively to some potential confounders that might vex the assembly of a public. Before turning to two potential misrecognitions, having to do respectively with homophobia and personhood, I look at a possible consequence of framing subjects in the way they are framed in the ASSAf report. I differentiate between misrecognition and consequence because the latter does not challenge the possibility for recognition so much as it worries about a future in which the understanding implicit in the report may have taken hold.
I join others invested in emancipatory queer politics in their scepticism. Sylvia Tamale, a prominent Ugandan activist, lawyer and academic, told a reporter: ‘I highly doubt that [the report] will influence policymakers. The fact that it was developed by ASSAf is also significant as it’ll give policymakers the usual excuse to dismiss it as a report influenced by whites’ (Wild Reference Wild2015). Tamale is not wholly misled. Of the thirteen panel members, only one – Juliet Kiguli, also the sole representative from Uganda and the sole contributor based in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa – was a Black African. With the exception of two Indian South African contributors, the rest of the panel members, as far as I could tell,Footnote 16 were white, and several of the panel members’ biographies were dotted with affiliations to institutions in the global North, posing an optical problem for the report. Inasmuch as South Africa is the gateway to Africa for the West, it can also be seen as the entry point for Western influence.
Dennis Altman, a scholar of sexuality and globalization, after noting some of the report’s shortcomings, wrote in an editorial: ‘Only organising at a local level, and using language appropriate to African conditions, rather than the international rhetoric of human rights, is likely to succeed. I applaud this report, but unfortunately deeply held prejudices are not easily changed by appeals to science and reason’ (Altman Reference Altman2015). Let us consider now why the ‘language’ of the report may not be ‘appropriate to African conditions’, and why ‘science and reason’ may be unsuited to eradicating ‘deeply held prejudices’.
Possible consequence: choiceless subjects denied rights
I worry about the consequences of rendering rights-bearing subjects as choiceless subjects whose responsibilities as citizens are, in aggregate (and with the possible help of the state and society), to benefit the common good. It raises two basic questions. If some forms of erotic expression are understood as chosen, or mutable, would that make those expressions legitimate objects of punitive control? And, if the enfranchisement of classes of citizens fails to lead to gains in public health or in the national economy or against violence, is that then reason to deny them citizenship?
To restate the first question another way: if the choiceless sexual citizen is cathected towards the body politic, what kinds of subjects are simultaneously distanced from it? This question is important given the broad range of non-heterosexual intimacies and erotics that have been documented in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which do not conform to the depiction of legitimate rights-bearing subjects here. These might include: situationally variable same-sex intimacy, such as the boy-wives of Southern African labour migration (Moodie etal. Reference Moodie, Ndatshe and Sibuyi1988; Epprecht Reference Epprecht2004); erotic relationships that blur the distinctions between sexuality, kinship and friendship (e.g. Dankwa Reference Dankwa2021); sexual intimacies that appear coerced or incentivized because of their transactional nature, such as sex work; and even relations and self-identifications that are understood as entirely instrumental, like the ‘fake gays’ who pretend in order to access resources (Biruk Reference Biruk2020).
The second question has to do with the possible failure to contribute to the particular metrics of modernity that define the common good. If classes of citizens belong only on the terms of economic, public health and civil society gains, can a failure to realize those gains open them up to persecution? As I suggested in the previous section, the argument that (fully recognized) queer people contribute to the common good relies on strategic framing. As has happened all over the world, higher HIV incidence among MSM can easily be used to argue that they work against public health goals. Moreover, tethering LGBTI rights to development indicators makes inclusion contingent on phenomena over which queer people exercise no control.
First potential misrecognition: the origins of homophobia
The report largely takes homophobic discourse as empirical statements about nature, the present and the past. It assumes that when people talk about science, they are engaging in discourse that can be countered in scientific terms, presuming that when homophobia persists, it is a result of a lack of scientific literacy or knowledge. One commentator wrote after the release of the ASSAf report:
The ‘scientific’ thinking here (and bear with us) is that, because researchers have not found a specific gene that is associated with homosexuality, science cannot say that some people are born gay. And if they are not born that way, the elastic logic goes, homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. And states are within their rights to criminalize some behaviour. ‘I want a specific answer,’ the president said, ‘not a political answer’ … What difference will this report make? It would be naive to expect that rational argument – scientific thinking – can draw the poison from the venomous attitudes that drive hatred and prejudice … Countering such claims [that the ‘natural order’ is violated to grave consequence in the case of miscegenation] alone does not dismantle the regime that produces them, but it offers ammunition to undermine claims to legitimacy that such regimes may make. Science helped to strip away the cloak to reveal the true, ugly motivations for such racial discrimination (and continues to do so, because the argument that ‘mixed’ couples produce more-dysfunctional families than non-mixed ones still rears its ugly head from time to time). (Nature 2015)
The sense of indignation in this quotation at the ‘elastic logic’ suggests that the logic initially attempted is scientific logic confounded by ‘venomous attitudes’. More science will provide necessary – if not sufficient – ‘ammunition’ to fight the ‘true, ugly motivations’ of discrimination.
But the story of homophobia is not so simple. Homophobia is more than just one thing; there are many ‘homophobias’ (Murray Reference Murray and Murray2009). Some have convincingly argued that bouts of homophobia are a result of deliberately engineered panics by elites trying to maintain power in the face of encroaching opposition parties or of public recognition of the state’s failure to provide what it had promised (Epprecht Reference Epprecht2013: 132–9; Tamale Reference Tamale2013).Footnote 17 At times, accusations of homosexuality are used by the disenfranchised to check elite corruption (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2017). Others argue that religious ‘protective’ homophobia (Kaoma Reference Kaoma2018) stems from a concern for structures of social reproduction, such as the family, that have deteriorated under neoliberalism and globalization (Hoad Reference Hoad2007: 48–67). Rudolf Gaudio (Reference Gaudio2009: 189) argues that Nigerian church leaders are concerned with not seeming to encourage what they see as the sexual decadence of the West, lest their members defect to Islam; it is a competition to remain the most African contra the decadent West. Men who feel threatened by their diminished ability to exercise patriarchal control, largely as a result of stymied access to wealth, may try to reclaim power through homophobia, especially given how aid economies and human rights discourses appear to favour sexual minorities (Ratele Reference Ratele and Tamale2011; Ndjio Reference Ndjio2012; Biruk Reference Biruk2014). Still others have insisted that homophobia results from the globalization of a Western sexual ontology that re-codes previously unremarkable same-sex intimacies as sexual (Massad Reference Massad2007).
If, as some have suggested, homophobia is strategically mobilized by those in power, then they were consciously never making empirical claims about homosexuality. And if, as others have suggested, homophobia is about anxieties of neoliberal and neocolonial exploitation, that exploitation needs to be dealt with if homophobia – and other kinds of prejudice – are to be erased. Scientific claims made in homophobic discourse may never have been about science.
Second potential misrecognition: ‘sexual orientation’ and personhood
The ASSAf report takes for granted that sexual orientation exists as a universal element and experience of personhood. But sexuality and sexual orientation are historically produced categories and phenomena (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1978; Davidson Reference Davidson2001) that, although tied initially to European developments, came to the colonies as the objects of a prurient fascination and as a technique of power (e.g. Hoad Reference Hoad2007: 1–20), where they were both used and re-made alongside other categories, such as gender and race (McClintock Reference McClintock1995). Outside colonial governance, Western sexual ontologies have spread through the circulation of popular discourse and media, as well as through development projects, with a range of unexpected consequences (Altman and Symons Reference Altman and Symons2016). Despite the globalization of these concepts, there is plenty of reason to believe that they have not simply been received unchanged (e.g. Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2003), and that they have not eradicated the possibility for other ways of understanding and feeling intimacy, erotics and human relationship (e.g. Dankwa Reference Dankwa2021).
I suggested earlier that the (non-)choosing subject is only legible in terms of possessive liberal personhood. But such conceptions of personhood stand in stark contrast to normative notions of relational, emergent African personhood (see Menkiti Reference Menkiti and Wiredu2005), which, when in conflict with liberal notions of rights-bearing persons, can create an unresolvable tension between duties and rights (Molefe Reference Molefe2018). The report’s authors address African communitarianism in their invocation of ubuntu, but they do not interrogate the extent to which the duty-bearing persons implicated in such communitarianism may be incompatible with the rights-bearing persons on whose behalf they argue.
Emic conceptions of intimacy and how it relates to personhood have a great deal to do with the possibilities for sexual citizenship, not only because they speak to whether sexuality is legible and felt as a distinct aspect of personhood, but because they also determine the nature of responsibilities and entitlements, of the duties and rights on which citizenship is based. It is an open question whether the elite lawmakers, or even the Africans on whose behalf the report is advocating, recognize themselves and their worlds in the report.
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The ASSAf report is just one textual appeal in a diverse, astute, and largely very effective pro-LGBTI civil society movement. Considering that observation, this exercise has been a very modest one. Although it would not be in the spirit of the present analysis to offer concrete recommendations for future science-based attempts at LGBTI advocacy, a few things should be clear. First, political mobilizations of science are not always about the empirical findings of scientists. Future attempts at using science to influence social policy should ask what work scientific and scientistic discourse is doing, and whether what is at stake is in fact the establishment of scientific claims. Second, homophobia is not always about homosexuality. Sexuality is as easily construed as a site of reproduction, vitality, affinity and life as it is one of depredation, disease, anomie and death. The semiotic weight of this domain of social life means that anxieties about sexuality and intimacy are often about things such as stymied social reproduction, crises in masculinity, globalization and political-economic exploitation. One needs to ask, then, what material conditions need to change to reduce the pressures that easily make scapegoats of all kinds of minorities. Finally, all appeals for rights imply rights-bearing subjects. What qualifies one to be a rights-bearing subject and what duties one incurs as a result are not politically innocent and can have unintended consequences. Future appeals for rights should interrogate the potential unintended consequences as well as the possibility that the persons implied in these appeals may not comply with other understandings of personhood and belonging.
In framing this document in terms of aspirant co-production and public-conjuring, the essay illustrates a methodology for the analysis and evaluation of a broad range of activist expressions, and particularly those that aim to change minds about matters as fraught as sexuality. Inasmuch as all activism tries to make the world otherwise using the tools at hand, all activism is aspirational in the sense relevant here. Of particular relevance to STS and to queer advocacy, I have described and critiqued the depictions of legitimate sexual citizens, focusing particularly on how choice becomes a crucial criterion for inclusion. The problems I raise – just some of many potential confounders that could be brought up – I hope will encourage more critical exercises like this one while also identifying important considerations for future attempts to use science to change minds about sexuality.
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited immensely from the comments offered by two anonymous reviewers. Several others have offered valuable feedback, including Cal Biruk, George Paul Meiu, Sophia Roosth, and the students who workshopped an earlier version of this article at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Gender and Sexuality Workshop.
Renugan Raidoo is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Harvard University.
