Desiring Same-Sex Intimacies

When I started my research, there existed no self-declared lesbian group in Ghana that might have offered itself as an obvious place to start. I thus sought to find women whose female friendships included erotic intimacies. The epistemological challenge was to identify women who were intimately involved with each other without assuming either the primacy of their sexual liaison over other aspects of their friendships or a fixed boundary between sexual and non-sexual intimacy. This would have privileged and reified “sexuality,” the very category I had set out to question. While the manner in which I went about my research owed much to post-structuralist theories that have destabilized categories of identity, my approach arose from simple necessity. Given the absence of a language about “lesbianism,” and given the fact that in public discourse same-sex desire was considered taboo, it was not feasible to state upfront that I was looking for women who had sexual relationships with each other. When I did state the matter directly, I encountered a range of self-proclaimed experts on sin and sex who expressed a voyeuristic interest in the sexual aspects of “what lesbians do.” These “experts” – including hotel owners, journalists, or pastors – carried out their own covert “research” in order to produce sensationalizing sermons or media accounts featuring same-sex affairs. They were quick to declare their own heterosexuality – and invited me to do as they did. From such encounters I learned much about the mechanisms through which lesbianism is imagined – secret cults, prostitution, and promiscuity – but little about the day-to-day practices of women who love women.

Initially, I tried to follow-up on public rumors about the double sex-lives of female members of Ghana’s “jet-set” (such as university-trained professionals or frequent-flying wives among Ghana’s political and business elite). Doors were continually closed in my face, however, and I eventually gave up. In the two instances where I did manage to speak to elderly elite women who were said to have had female lovers, I did not dare broach the issue of same-sex intimacy: it would have been indecorous to do so, as I was so much their junior. Similarly, economically powerful but less educated market women only lingered at the horizon of my search, namely in the accounts of unmarried young sports women who were committed to protecting the privacy of their older lovers or “sugar mothers,” and who sensed that absolute discretion might be the key to the viability of their own same-sex desires in the future. As a result, I found myself in a position where I had to contend with what is perhaps a corollary of ethnographic work on sexual intimacies: that it is easier to carry out participant observation and find respondents among those who have less “prestige” to lose and whose lives are shaped by material precariousness.

Inspired by a rich body of literature that retrieves African women’s voices by reading against the grain of missionary and court records (Reference WhiteWhite 2000; Reference Hodgson and McCurdyHodgson and McCurdy 2001), I began my research by studying boarding-school reports at the Basel Mission ArchiveFootnote ⁴ and scanning through customary court cases at the National Archives of Ghana, in which women accused each other over seemingly minor issues. While colonial records have been useful sources to historians exploring male same-sex transgression, female desires are much less visible. Boarding-school and mission reports do, however, hint at the significance of girlfriendships and adult women’s intimate desires alongside marriage and motherhood. Some of the more far-fetched matters brought up in customary court cases reminded me of the explanations often given to outsiders when fights ensue between jealous female (ex-)lovers in the marketplace. To outsiders, unaware of the amorous passions of the fighting women, the catalysts for these explosive disputes seem petty. Often, it is the degree of intensity on display that alerts insiders and leads them to speculate about the erotic passion at stake in the conflict between the fighting women.

The more I became convinced that female same-sex passions were prevalent in Ghana, and the more trust I built up among the women I interacted with, the more I heard them bring up the term supi – the polyvalent term for an intimate same-sex friend or lover that became an important starting point for my research. I followed up on a mention of this term one early evening, while waiting for my youngest respondent, eighteen-year-old Khadija Coleman, who lives among a host of elderly female relatives in Accra Central.

It was safe to casually follow up on the term supi in the tipsy atmosphere among Khadija’s “aunties.” A few weeks later in the same compound, however, I found myself hitting a wall as I took to interviewing the eldest woman among them, Khadija’s ninety-year-old great grandmother. I was genuinely interested in the life history of the frail, elderly lady with the big glasses who sat in the open door of her room all day, quietly following the lively conversations and dealings going on in her narrow compound. From previous visits I knew that she was aware of both the sex work and the same-sex passions flourishing inside and around their drinking spot compound. Thus, after she had told her life story, I tried to find a way into the topic of same-sex love, by picking up on one of her favorite subjects: her deceased son, whom she, like everyone else, considered a kodjo besia, a feminine man.Footnote ⁷

Among my primary respondents, it was established by the time they allowed me to record their life history that I studied cultures of same-sex intimacy. But with elderly women I did not feel entitled to touch on this directly. Nevertheless, spurred by the desire to elicit some kind of information on the topic, I attempted to cajole Nana Mansa into talking about it and thus hastened the closure of our conversation. This raises a set of ethical questions. Since I could not establish my project and search participants by advertising through official channels, the process of locating respondents was bound up with long conversations in which I would convey my own queerness. The only way to appropriately broach my research subject therefore was through indirection. My approach was thus informed by the indirect ways in which sexuality in Ghana has been dealt with historically, by the current anti-gay discourse, and not least by the strategies of my key respondents, who would often deter me from making plain my research interest.

Participant observation, the much-debated method at the heart of anthropology, is especially necessary when exploring practices that are considered non-normative or taboo. This holds true not only for the study of same-sex intimacy, but for any practices that fall outside normative ideals and require explorative research. Anthropologists of West Africa have pleaded for radical forms of participating, which acknowledge that there is no observation without participation, and which seek “social closeness” and “emotional involvement” (Reference SpittlerSpittler 2001; Reference Van der Geest, Basu and AabyVan der Geest 1998). But what does radical participation mean with regard to exploring erotic friendship and same-sex intimacy? Where are the boundaries between social and emotional closeness, feelings of affection, and sexual attraction? How far should and can emotional involvement go? And beyond this particular subject, how much spontaneous lying and evasion about one’s own intimate life is permissible in the field, when we expect or hope that our informants will be truthful?

Inspired by the paradigms of “feminist anthropology,” questions about the power dynamics and “the relationship between the writer (and readers) and the people being written about” (Reference Abu-LughodAbu-Lughod 1993, 5) are at the heart of this inquiry. I am particularly drawn to Lila Abu-Lughod’s critique of Clifford and Marcus’s approach to “writing culture” (Reference Abu-Lughod and FoxAbu-Lughod 1991; Reference 285Clifford and MarcusClifford and Marcus 1986). As a feminist of mixed Palestinian and US-American parentage or, as she says, a “halfie,” Abu-Lughod is wary of the ways in which participant observation risks flattening out internal cultural differences. Even if (as in Clifford and Marcus’s approach) culture is written with an emphasis on the poetic, and even if the subjectivity of the author is exposed, “writing culture” engages in a professionalized generalization about Others. Abu-Lughod advocates writing “ethnographies of the particular,” by finding “ways of writing about lives so as to constitute them as less other” (Reference Abu-Lughod and Fox1991, 149). This approach resonates with my own “halfie” position as the daughter of a Swiss working-class nurse and a Ghanaian medical doctor, straddling “split loyalties” and the inherent dilemma of observing while participating. The experience of being “othered” in both African and European contexts had made me wary of the grand identitarian schemes of feminist or lesbian solidarities that assume a joint identity or engage participatory research methods that may lead to the downplaying of differences (Reference AhmedAhmed 2000). An ethnography of the particular that seeks to document lived experiences through the process of generating life hi/stories has the potential to (re)articulate differences, without othering them.

Being “particular” necessitates a close look at the epistemological and methodological premises upon which data is collected and transformed into analysis (Reference WeissWeiss 2011). Often, the daunting task of unearthing stigmatized or hidden sexual cultures seems to obviate a critical analysis of the process of data collection and interpretation. Therefore, research on same-sex desiring subjects has been particularly susceptible to treating “data as ‘raw’ data, with no attention to the ways data are used, derived, or produced” (Reference WeissWeiss 2011, 650). By spelling out my methodological tools and analytical practices, I seek to write against the veiling of the process of knowledge production and, perhaps, to decolonize or at least interrupt the hegemonic ways in which “queer” Others have been called into being in juxtaposition to “modern” homosexuals. In this book, one attempt at making more transparent the process of generating data is reflected in the different typefaces used when quoting my respondents. Since they usually code-switched, all the words that were originally uttered in Twi or Ga and have been translated are put in italics, while terms that were originally uttered in Ghanaian English remain non-italicized. Though it may irritate the flow of reading, this unevenness is a reminder of the processes of translation that are inherent to knowledge production and scientific research.

The Ethics and Erotics of Being Indirect

Locating same-sex desiring working-class women in Ghana required the “unlearning” of my pre-conceived notions of sexuality as a social identity and the developing of an indirect language of allusion. To begin with, the process of locating respondents was difficult and lengthy. It took shape through a series of (constitutive) misunderstandings that taught me to be discreet and indirect, as this early interaction, recorded in my fieldnotes, reveals:

As this episode shows, the potential for misunderstanding in ethnographic observation has surprising and paradoxical implications. Janet Aidoo, whom I had met years before through my long-standing friend Josephine Enyonam Agbenozan, was not used to being asked to speak about same-sex intimacy and certainly not to someone she had barely met. Unimpressed by my being a doctoral research student, she made her own sense of my desire for knowledge. Hence, any attempt at explaining my interest in intimate same-sex cultures could easily be interpreted as a subdued way of indicating sexual interest, inasmuch as the desire, on the one hand, to speak about intimacy and, on the other, to speak intimately cannot be detached from each other (Reference Cameron and KulickCameron and Kulick, 2003). One might also argue that Janet chose to sexualize my intentions as a way of articulating her own interest in say, having a well-to-do “half-caste” girlfriend, somewhat “exotic,” yet accessible – or in setting the romantic foundations for a lasting overseas connection. While I never expected that I would have much control over how my intentions in the field were interpreted, this encounter alerted me to the fact that researcher and researched do “study” each other on an intimate level and thereby create erotically charged situations.

These ambiguities speak not only to the complexities of researching sexualities or any other topic that is shrouded in secrecy, but to the broader question of the place of the erotic in the field. The posthumous publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s personal Diary (1967), in which he detailed how he “lusted” after missionary and Trobriand women, begs for a thorough examination of the question: What does it mean for ethnographic research if is not possible without moments of affection and/or desire? What if the person you are about to interview asks you to rub some lotion on her back? What does it mean if the urge arises to embrace and comfort a respondent who is heartbroken? Whether or not one decides to yield to such impulses, they shape our research in significant ways (Reference NewtonNewton 1993; Reference Kulick and WillsonKulick and Willson 1995; Reference Lewin and LeapLewin and Leap 1996). Kulick in particular argued that desire can be epistemologically productive, since erotic relationships, whether or not consummated sexually, represent “one especially poignant means through which anthropologists become aware of themselves as positioned, partial, knowing selves” (Reference Kulick, Kulick and Willson1995, 18). This must, however, include a critical awareness of the “racist and colonialist conditions which make possible the unidirectional discourse about the sexuality of the people we study” (Reference Kulick, Kulick and WillsonKulick 1995, 4).

Making clear my research interest without reproducing preconceived notions of sexual identity or misleading respondents as to the fact that I would write about the topic of intimacy and about whatever our interactions and conversations included, was a challenge. Besides, I had to learn how to deal with the queerness – hence the “deviance” attributed to my project – and the rejections and ambiguities it implied. Once women realized that I was aware of the erotic dimension of their friendships, they either distanced themselves or began to sound out romantic prospects, which they did more or less aggressively. Feeling vulnerable and exposed, my dismissal of blatant sexual advances was born out of personal fears and a fraught respect for cross-cultural intimacies, rather than out of clear-cut moral or strategic considerations. Once attuned to the indirect ways in which the women themselves jokingly foreclosed or deflected unwanted attention, while keeping male and female suitors in their favor, I became more confident in flirtatiously negotiating “the erotics of fieldwork” (Reference NewtonNewton 1993, 5).

Whether this mutual observation – this feeling out of each other’s motives – is pleasurable or frightening, the desire for knowledge reflects the fieldworker’s dependence on their respondents. This dependence, however, is overwritten when reversed in writing by ethnographers who appear as the “knowing strangers” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2000) who authorize their own interpretation of the Other’s desires, thereby veiling their own, ethnographic desire. Cultural critic Sara Ahmed has taken the question of “who knows” and who translates strangers and strangeness into a field of knowledge, as the starting point from which to scrutinize the ways in which (white Australian) feminist ethnographers have presented their native “informants” as friends and co-authors. By simply framing them as co-authors we conceal “that the ones who are known have not authorized the forms of writing and knowledge produced by ethnographers, but have been authorized by it” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2000, 55). Ahmed demonstrates that the fraught solidarities in the field hinge on our troubled desire to hear (and speak for) the subaltern, while the condition of the subaltern is constituted by the impossibility of being heard on her own terms (Reference Spivak, Nelson and GrossbergSpivak 1988).

When I asked Josephine Enyonam Agbenozan to translateFootnote ¹⁰ and assist me in this project, we were already close and had spent time together both in Ghana and Switzerland. As reflected in the above situation with Janet, Josephine was more than an assistant. She became my research associate, whose desire to know critically shaped the emerging data. We usually met up in the afternoons to visit women, and afterwards, often until late into the night, to write down informal conversations, reflect upon our respective interactions, compare notes, and evaluate where and how they diverged from one another. In Suakrom, my second research site, Josephine stayed with me on the weekends. We would take turns cleaning, cooking, fetching water, and carrying it up to the room I rented on the top floor of a two-storey family house. When doing interviews together, our different cultural sensitivities and ways of expressing ourselves made for a multi-directional social situation that allowed for complex and indirect interactions. In this triangular interview situation, it was not necessarily our questions, but rather our closeness and contestations that inspired respondents to strike up conversations about the meanings of same-sex friendship and intimacy.

Telling Life Hi/stories

Pursuing my interest in retrieving women’s voices by documenting their day-to-day lives, I adopted a methodological tool of open narrative interviews that followed a biographical approach (Reference Dausien, Diezinger, Kitzer, Anker, Bingel, Haas and OdiernaDausien 1994) and the concept of life hi/storyFootnote ¹¹ (Reference RosenthalRosenthal 1993; Reference Rosenthal and Fischer-RosenthalRosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal 1997). This was configured by a consideration of Ghanaian narrative traditions (Reference ClarkClark 2010). While sociologists highlight the usefulness of “biographical self-representations” in Euro-American societies, in which the individual is constantly called into doing “biographical work” (Reference Rosenthal and Fischer-RosenthalRosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal 1997, 412), Africanists emphasize the usefulness of the life history genre, especially in the Akan context with its elaborate orality and narrative traditions (Reference ClarkClark 2010; Reference MiescherMiescher 2005). As Gracia Clark explains, Akan people are trained to give coherent and indirect narrative accounts from childhood:

Following Akan guest protocols, before being formally welcomed arriving visitors are seated, given water, and then asked to explain their motivation and intention of the visit. Thus my “grand tour” opening question to their life hi/story was preceded by my own “arrival story” that described how I had met and became interested in my respondent’s life history. I also repeated what they already knew, that I was writing a book about women in Ghana and their “friendships” with each other – consciously using the term friendship which is ambiguous in itself and open to interpretation.

Though it was appropriate and helpful to frame my research interest in historical terms, the life history approach was not always conducive to grasping the erotic dimension of women’s lives. Many women did not consider their intimate lives to be relevant or to be something that can be directly voiced as part of one’s history. Often they elaborated on their amorous same-sex relationships in more detail only in our follow-up conversations. However, re-telling the past and crafting a personal biography was significant to initiating reflections about their intimacies and connecting my external, conceptual questions to their lived experience. Unlike conversations happening in between market stalls, within the hearing of neighboring traders, the recording situation required a quiet, intimate space. Finding a calm interview spot within the women’s personal environment was often challenging; noise was a major issue. Especially when the electricity was on: It was not always feasible to switch off rattling fans, TV or radio programs, which were sometimes put on precisely to ensure privacy. Whenever possible, the first interview would take place inside or just outside their room. This meant having to keep other compound members supportive. In some cases, some privacy could be brought about by bringing along foodstuffs and asking the interviewee’s relatives to prepare food for all of us, while we could retreat to a quiet corner of the compound. If such a corner could not be carved out, interviewees suggested a friend’s room or a drinking spot in the area. Toward the end of my fieldwork in Suakrom, I conducted interviews up in my room, out of reach of the members of the compound with whom I lived.

The recording was rounded off by going for a stroll, eating together, and my buying cell phone credits to ensure that they could get back to me if they were unsettled by the repercussions of sharing their story and their concerns. Making monetary reimbursement in an appropriate, casual way, especially after in-depth, stirring conversations, took some practice. I did not usually inform respondents in advance that I would compensate them. Although cash gifts are commonly handed to interviewees by investigative print journalists,Footnote ¹² this was not necessarily expected, depending on the interviewee’s social positioning and on our rapport. A few women, with whom I was only loosely connected, did not want to give further weight to the information provided by engaging in a immediate monetary “transaction.” Most women, however, told me I should offer whatever I wanted to give “from my heart” or they expressed their hope that I would help out in an emergency. Such situations always arose sooner or later: a child or grandmother in need of urgent medical care, or a funeral that begged for contributions – funerals being one of the biggest investments in southern Ghanaian life. While it was instructive to be immersed in women’s constant negotiations around mutual material assistance, I often saw myself negotiating unspoken hopes and expectations that did not match my budget. Aware of the reputed stinginess of Europeans who enjoyed the hospitality of local Ghanaians, I indeed needed to figure out what I wanted to give “from my heart” and what was appropriate, considering my position as a prospective professional scholar. One way of thanking respondents on a more collective level was to host small parties at a local drinking spot. These occasions made for a welcome change, especially as many women were curious to meet the others I had made contact with. In Accra, where respondents from different boroughs would attend, such events at least temporarily generated community.

Locating the “Field”

The core anthropological data of this project consists of fieldnotes and fifty-nine audio-taped interviews generated during a total of seventeen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in southern Ghana: An initial stay in February/March 2006; two main research periods of seven months each in 2007/08; and a concluding stay in January 2012. During the first research period I was based primarily in Accra; during the second phase I lived in the medium-sized town that I am referring to as Suakrom, composed of the Twi words “to learn” and “town.” Sadly, the unpredictability of present and future sentiments against those who may be read as sexual deviants warrants this pre-cautionary measure.

While starting to interact with women like Janet and other working-class women who did not portray their same-sex intimacies in lesbian terms, I was equally interested in the emerging activist communities that did identify with notions of lesbianism. Thus, I became involved with the activities of a community-based sexual rights initiative in an impoverished neighborhood of Accra. To prevent local hostilities, this initiative that grew into an NGO presented itself as a human rights office, while also doing HIV/AIDS prevention work and tapping into global funds for sexual minorities.

The collaboration with this NGO proved tricky, since my agenda to make contacts and preliminary inquiries was confronted with the agenda of its leader, who urged me to fundraise and build up the NGO’s practically non-existent lesbian wing. The leader bemoaned the attitude and the lack of dedication of the women he had put in charge of forming a lesbian group. He appealed to me to raise their consciousness by “educating” them about “who they are” – conveying, thereby, that the fullest and most liberating expression of loving a woman as a woman was to develop a sexual identity. Although his appeal was not compatible with my open-ended, inductive approach, I followed his invitation to organize an afternoon party to gather women who had once shown interest in being part of a women’s group. This party provided a fruitful entry point. Stella Odamten, a former group facilitator of the NGO, introduced me to a range of women who engaged in intimate same-sex friendships in her neighborhood. Stella also declared that the only route to gain access to and win the trust of “lesbians,” was to pretend to be “one of them.” While my own queerness obviated pretense, I refrained from explicitly “outing” myself in favor of following the women’s examples of being indirect. Many women were either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with terms like “queer,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” or simply did not provide the space for a “coming out” narrative. Given that the script to “come out” and assume a sexual identity was not desired by the majority of my respondents, I sought indirect ways of conveying that I was aware of the sexual intimacies that could connect two “very close” female friends; an awareness that was invariably attributed to my own (stated or presumed) same-sex experience.

Coincidentally, I discovered that I could make discreet statements by way of showing photographs. Alongside pictures of my parents and siblings, I had photographs of mostly female or gender-bending friends, including a picture of myself arm in arm with a former female lover. While some women ignored our romantic glance, possibly reading it as a sign of Westerners’ reputed extravagances, others seemed to detect the “special” quality of our intimacy: They flirtatiously inquired about my age and whether I was married or had a child. Rather than preempting more intrusive questions by either reducing my age to twenty-nine (as many childless women do) or blankly telling them that due to my economic privilege, I could afford to approach my mid-thirties without husband or children, I volunteered information about how my life diverged from a heteronormative script. Even though increasing numbers of educated Ghanaian woman do not conform to the script of being married by the age of thirty either, the fact that I freely admitted to it, sparked suspicions about my queerness.

In search of a second urban field site, Suakrom drew my attention because of its considerable difference from the megacity of Accra in terms of its size and ethnic composition. The majority of my respondents in Accra belonged to the Ga-Dangme ethno-linguistic group indigenous to the southeast of Ghana. The Ga-Dangme constitute about 7.4 percent of the overall population. Suakrom, in contrast, is dominated by the Akan, Ghana’s largest ethno-linguistic group that hails from south-central and western Ghana. The Akan make up 47.5 percent of Ghana’s 24 million inhabitants (Nyarko 2010, 34). The reputed beauty, wit, and post-independence sophistication of Suakrom’s townswomen and the rumors in Ghana about the town’s relaxed sexual morals made Suakrom a compelling environment in which to examine shifting representations of gender and sexuality. The town’s statistically high HIV rate and foreign sponsored AIDS prevention program targeting MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) and working with peer educators added to Suakrom’s appeal as a site for conversations about sexuality. Moreover, in 2006, during the media scandal around a supposedly “banned homoconference,” that was to take place in Accra, homosexuality was consistently attributed to “other” ethnic and political groups. Suakrom, as a multi-ethnic, commercial town and former transit hub, could provide ample grounds for the articulation of rumors and suspicions – and, hence, inroads for conversation about sexual Others.

There were two additional local incentives to do research in Suakrom: its vibrant marketplace and a state-sponsored semi-professional women’s football team. Dominated by autonomous female traders, the marketplace historically constitutes an important site for the forging of women’s trading associations and personal alliances, as shown in Gracia Clark’s work on Akan traders in Central Market Kumasi, one of West Africa’s largest markets (Reference Clark1994). The female football arena is, furthermore, considered a bonding space for self-assertive young women, many of them with masculine gender presentations. As I had found in my interactions with similar teams in Accra, the football pitch was a playground for female masculinities and a space in which same-sex bonds were tacitly tolerated. Young, unmarried, and from outside of town, most of Suakrom’s female footballers lacked local kin ties and had little social and cultural capital. They lived under precarious economic conditions and found financially supportive “sugar mummies” in the marketplace.

The question of who provides financially emerged not only in my respondents’ relationships or in flirtatious negotiations such as the one with Patricia Opoku, captured in the Prologue’s vignette. Questions over material differences cut across the process of doing research and my own friendships and research relations. Both in Accra and Suakrom most of the women who were ready to engage with me and Josephine, my research associate, were subjected to precarious material circumstances, while I was considered a well off “half-caste” or “Burger.”Footnote ¹³ Negotiations over the status and scope of our connections formed a crucial part of the process of spinning a web of research relations. My relationship with Josephine was equally shaped by the economic, geopolitical, and educational disparities with which we had to contend. At the same time, the tensions between myself, Josephine, and our respondents enabled spaces of social closeness that allowed us to share intimate life histories – spaces that alerted me to the politics of transnational friendship and (dis)connection, and the kind of solidarity that could perhaps span such irreducible differences.