Critiquing the Critique

While I have been surprised by both the success of, and the increased mobilization against, postcolonial homophobia on a global scale, I have been particularly intrigued by the negative responses from activists on the African continent.^{Footnote 6} For example, in January 2011 I received the Avaaz petition at least ten times on one day alone, yet none of the e-mails had been forwarded to me from South Africa, the country the petition was concerned about and addressing. In an open letter posted on the Internet the Triangle Project (2011), a well-established LGBTI organization in Cape Town, explained its decision not to sign or support this and similar petitions, referring to the “public exposure of bruised and battered faces and bodies of survivors” as “unethical and sensationalist.” The individual woman, whether named or not, appears as a “voiceless victim,” while the “wide-ranging emotional and social impact that this kind of global and local exposure might have on survivors” is largely ignored. The Triangle letter also expressed concerns about “the vague and unsubstantiated statistics used in support for these petitions.” The Avaaz petition states that “‘corrective rape’ is based on the outrageous and utterly false notion that a lesbian woman can be raped to ‘make her straight,’ but this heinous act is not even classified as a hate crime in South Africa.” However, it also claims, with no supporting evidence, that “in Cape Town alone, there [is] more than one ‘corrective rape’ per day” and that “a South African girl born today is more likely to be raped than she is to learn to read.”^{Footnote 7} Since no source for such a statistic is cited, the petition has the effect of sensationalizing the crimes and exploiting the “victims” for the publicity value of their images. It also ignores the many organizations and activists that for decades have been working against hate crime and gender-based violence more generally. It is also, in fact, very difficult to tell whether violence against lesbians, or against queer people generally, is indeed on the increase or whether more crimes are being reported, identified, and registered as hate crimes—perhaps due, in part, to the advocacy work of a number of organizations.

The term “corrective rape” (or a similarly common term, “curative rape”) seems to suggest, further, that the (sole?) motivation behind an attack is known—that it is to “correct” lesbian sexuality through rape. In a country like South Africa that experiences a high number of violent crimes in general and gender-based violence in particular, it is often difficult to answer the question of what exactly motivated an attack (see Gunkel Reference Gunkel2010). This, of course, is not an attempt to downplay the seriousness and specificity of homophobia in the context of South Africa; after all, the idea that homosexuality is “un-African” proliferates in public discourse and is an opinion shared by a significant portion of the population. Despite the postapartheid Constitution—the first constitution worldwide that explicitly protects the rights of LGBTI people—organized religious leaders, politicians, and nationalist voices continuously feed homophobic discourse in the name of tradition and culture. But even if the motivation behind an attack is articulated and transmitted—for example, by the rapists themselves—the question remains whether it is in fact productive to reproduce this motivation through language/meaning within an activist and academic discourse. In her article “Violence against Black Lesbians: Minding Our Language,” Mary Hames, for example, suggests that simply by calling violence against lesbians “corrective” or “curative” we become complicit in constructing the idea that there is indeed something to cure or to correct: “‘To correct’ means there is something wrong and by claiming their terms we pathologise ourselves” (2011:89).

The Triangle Project also points out that by demanding that President Zuma and the Minister of Justice “publicly condemn ‘corrective rape,’” the online petitions only address violence against lesbians, while violence against LGBTIs more generally is not taken into consideration. This approach dis-links homophobia from gender-based violence, as well as violence against women overall, and therefore disengages the political demands in these cases from those of the women’s movement (a connection that LGBTI organizations for a long time struggled to establish). As a result the term “corrective rape” tends to individualize homophobia: it pathologizes the perpetrators of such violence, but does not address the structural, institutional, and historical frameworks of hate crimes. In its appeal for a deeper understanding and critique of the ways in which homophobia and rights discourses are intertwined in postapartheid South Africa, the Triangle Project argues for further debate and collective engagement of various stakeholders around the issue of hate crimes, and specifically for “politics and activism that move beyond only demands for legislative reform.” This is particularly needed in a country where “progressive legislation and extreme levels of gender violence co-exist.” It is this very last demand, pointing to possible limitations of the (human) rights framework, that I wish to explore in order to imagine other possibilities for interventions and responses to homophobia within a postcolonial context—while not concealing its historical legacy, which is necessarily linked to the colonial.

The Geopolitical Mapping of Development and Homophobia

The public statement made by the Triangle Project was not the first critique articulated by African LGBTI organizations and activists in regard to global initiatives against African postcolonial homophobia. In 2007, for example, an open letter signed by African LGBTI Human Rights Defenders was addressed to Peter Tatchell and his London-based organization Outrage! in which the organization’s involvement in Nigerian politics around sexuality was criticized as “exploitative and harmful for local activists” (Monthly Review Foundation 2007). Tatchell himself was asked to end his “neo-colonial” activities and “stay out of Africa.” More recently, in June 2012 a boycott was conducted against Kenya’s first Gay Pride Parade, which had been organized not by local LGBTI organizations but by the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. Interestingly, the responses not only targeted “U.S. imperialism” in relation to sexual politics but also pointed to the “poor human rights record” of the U.S. more generally as well as its military and economic linkages to exactly those regimes that it criticizes in relation to LGBTI rights on the African continent (see Sokari 2012).

All three responses can be illuminated by recent scholarship that theorizes the concept of homophobia from a postcolonial perspective and defines homophobia not only as an act of violence itself, but also as a discursive formation that reveals its own form of violence. According to Karl Bryant and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz,

While not denying the very material consequences of homophobic violence, Bryant and Vidal-Ortiz encourage us to focus on “homophobia as a conceptual tool and discursive resource [that] itself engenders sets of effects” (2008:392). Indeed, in recent years scholars, in particular LGBTI people of color, have increasingly pointed to the inclusion of homophobia, and concurrently the mobilization of gay rights, in anti-immigration discourse within European and North American discourses of nationalism (see, e.g., Puar Reference Puar2007; Butler Reference Butler2008; Haritaworn Reference Haritaworn2008). This mobilization of sexual rights seems increasingly to replace—at least in the African context—the appropriation of women’s rights rhetoric by the “war on terror.” Alongside an increasing mainstreaming of homosexuality in Europe and the U.S., therefore, we see LGBTI rights (and human rights more generally) being mobilized in anti-immigration discourse as well as in recent military interventions, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. As an effect, homophobia is simultaneously nationalized and racialized, which shows how the geopolitical mapping of homophobia (Puar Reference Puar2007) works. This further points to the limitations of the human rights framework and urges us not to make state accountability—via the issue of rights—the sole focus of our politics, be it local or global, online or offline.

Against the backdrop of the “war on terror,” the post-9/11 politics of racism in Europe and the U.S., and the gendered technologies and sexualization of these politics, it does, of course, matter that the online petitions emerged, and were sent out from, these very countries. It is particularly important that these requests by international online petitioners have also emerged at a time when the European Parliament and European and the U.S. governments continue to threaten to make financial aid to African countries dependent on their legislative actions in respect to homosexuality and homophobia.

In October 2011, for example, in a BBC interview that was posted on You Tube and viewed widely, British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that the U.K. “want(s) to see countries that receive our aid adhering to proper human rights. And that includes how people treat gay and lesbian people.”^{Footnote 8} Such a policy on the part of donor governments—of making financial aid conditional on the human rights record—is of course not new. What is interesting, though, is not only that gay rights have now become the measure of human rights policies more generally, but also that such demands are put forth by countries in which homophobia and transphobia are pervasive.^{Footnote 9} In the BBC interview Cameron conveniently elides this fact, not only referring to Africa and Africans as one undifferentiated “other,” but also positioning the West in the all-too-familiar position as the source of guidance and enlightenment: “Well, you know they are in a different place to us on this issue.... I think if you go back in our own country’s history there was a time when we... till quite recently discriminated in lots of ways. I think these countries are all on a journey, and it’s up to us try and help them on that journey and that’s exactly what we do.” In a similar vein the European Parliament in December 2009 decided to make financial aid to Uganda conditional on the Ugandan government’s action on the proposed antigay law. The German Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development followed this example (see Queer.de 2010). In 2011 Barack Obama threatened to cut aid to Nigeria if the country passed a proposed bill prohibiting same-sex relationships and threatening prison sentences of up to fourteen years—a concern that Obama shared with the EU Parliament.^{Footnote 10}

Popular cultural responses to Cameron’s speech followed immediately. In his weekly video blog What’s Up Africa, Ikenna Azuike called the threat of aid withdrawal “blackmail.”

A statement posted online by the African Feminist Forum (2011) and signed by representatives of a number of African social justice activists also criticized the strategies of donor countries while welcoming attempts to protect the rights of LGBTI people.

The backlashes that a number of African activists fear are of central concern here. On the one hand, Western threats to cut aid reinforce the widespread populist notion that homosexuality is un-African in the first place—indeed that it is a “a western-sponsored ‘idea.’”^{Footnote 12} This discursive reversal has the effect of turning postcolonial homophobia into a position of protest against neocolonial politics and a demonstration of African sovereignty. On the other hand, the backlashes have material—and in fact bodily—consequences, since the political interventions have an immediate detrimental impact on the work of local activists and organizations. In an interview in November 2011 Ideanyi Keley Orazulike, the executive director of the International Centre for Advocacy on the Right to Health (ICARH), an independent research initiative in Nigeria that promotes the rights of sexual minorities, and also one of the individuals who signed the statement of African social justice activists, asks Western governments to “re-strategize”:

Importantly for political interventions emerging from Europe and the U.S., the statement by African social justice activists posted by the African Feminist Forum points to the need to historicize postcolonial homophobia by highlighting the colonial legacy of existing antisodomy laws in African countries; paradoxically, it is “the colonial legacy of the British Empire in the form of laws that criminalize same-sex sex [that] continues to serve as the legal foundation for the persecution of LGBTI people throughout the Commonwealth.” A similar argument is made by the Ugandan activists who appear in Mathilda Piehl’s documentary The Kuchus of Uganda (2008), who state that it was in fact colonial (or in the case of South Africa, apartheid) administrations that introduced homophobia to the legal framework (see also Phillips Reference Phillips2000).^{Footnote 14} This historical context also has echoes in the present, as in the involvement of U.S. right-wing evangelical groups in current homophobia campaigns in Africa. In 2012, as a result, a coalition of gay rights groups in Kampala (Sexual Minorities Uganda, or SMUG), filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. evangelist Scott Lively “for inciting the persecution of LGBT people....”^{Footnote 15} This lawsuit makes a clear link between postcolonial homophobia and religious fundamentalism, in this case—importantly—Christian fundamentalism; it is a court case that needs to be supported loudly, and globally, but particularly within the U.S. But it is not.

Another issue that needs to be considered is the complex question of whose rights are being defended in the antihomophobic rhetoric—that is, what constitutes a “homosexual.” Karl Bryant, for example, points to the possible effects of such discourses, arguing that “homophobia and antihomophobia may work together to produce ‘homonormative’ gay subjects” (2008:455); he is referring here to Lisa Duggan’s conceptualization of a “new homonormativity” that reflects and upholds heteronormative assumptions and institutions “while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (2003:50) rather than reflecting and embracing the diversity of the LGBTI community. This hegemonic framework of “gayness” not only has an invisible and unspoken component of “whiteness” (as argued by Bryant & Vidal-Ortiz Reference Bryant and Vidal-Ortiz2008:392) but also, as O’Brian argues, is embedded within “a culturally specific way of being queer that is enough in ‘sync’ with existing gender, class, racial and cultural norms as to be considered ‘acceptable’” (2008:501). Alternatively, Jasbir Puar (in Puar, Pitcher, and Gunkel Reference Puar, Pitcher and Gunkel2008) refers to what she terms “homonationalism,” a “pernicious binary” that conceptualizes the “homosexual other” as white and the “racial other as straight” and that contributes to the fracturing of communities.

This discursive production of the “proper” gay subject is extremely important when we consider possible interventions into postcolonial homophobia, especially in the context of a particular human rights framework. Rather than acknowledging the diversity of same-sex relationships in different African cultures, or the significance of local understandings of these relationships in the context of sociality and kinship ties, the demands for gay rights put forth in online petitions and by Western governments—or more specifically, the defense of rights on the basis of individual sexual orientation—refer to an assumed global gay identity only, a discourse that further enables an expansion of state boundaries and sovereign power. According to Martin Manalansan,

Practices of sexuality and intimacy are hence categorized in very specific terms—categories that allow limited flexibility and possibilities to expand. The notion of the “closet,” for example—as a concept that is oppositional to that of “coming out”—turns into a (racialized) symbol of the premodern backwardness from which African countries, as Cameron suggested, need to be extricated by the West.

It is thus not only U.S. and European politicians who look to the West as the reference point of modernity and development, but also many scholars within the field of sexuality studies. Lesbian and gay studies and queer theory have for a long time ignored cross-cultural and transnational formations of same-sex intimacy and sexuality that extend beyond European and North American borders. Only recently has the importance of locality, race, and postcoloniality entered the arena of queer epistemology. This new attention to cultural-historical contexts that have been dismissed too easily as premodern (as in the case of many African countries) allows us to focus not only on diverse concepts of intimacy and sociality, but also on varied possibilities for gender relations. The potential to conceptualize sexual practices, intimacy, and sociality beyond the rubric of identity politics has been highlighted in recent years in work on women-marriages, female husbands, sangomas and their ancestral wives, mati work, supi relationships, kuchus, and so on. Interestingly, many of these same-sex relationships often co-exist with heterosexual relationships and are accepted in societies that are otherwise considered as conservative in relation to sexual politics. Such an implicit challenge to notions of “heteronormativity” as well as “homonormitivity” points to a politics that transcends limited assumptions about sexuality and sexual practices, and that points to possibilities for alliances, sociality, and kinship, also within queer communities.

Concluding Remarks: Sociality, New Media, and the Political

Online petitions like the one initiated by Avaaz run the risk not only of ignoring the long history of same-sex intimacies and LGBTI politics on the African continent, but also of endorsing the foreign aid politics of donor countries and their geopolitical mapping of homophobia. Together, these interventions, in effect, constitute the entire African continent not only as a single country, but also as one that is more homophobic than others—without engaging with the question of why gay rights are as highly contested as they are in the process by which decolonized subjectivity is constituted in the African context.

This is not to say that online petitions like that of Avaaz (and this is just one example) have collected such an immense number of signatures only because they promote a politics of homonationalism (see Puar Reference Puar2007, Reference Puar, Pitcher and Gunkel2008). I would indeed prefer a more complex politics of analysis here, a politics that acknowledges the possibilities of homonationalism but also takes into consideration the fact that there are a number of people who have joined this and other transnational campaigns because they are seriously concerned about and invested in LGBTI politics within a transnational, and not only national, context. And some of them do position themselves politically and transnationally, often also in relation to “their own” national context.

An important question, therefore, remains: How is it possible to engage in global politics without loosing sight of one’s own context and of the dangers of complicity and collaboration? This question has been discussed widely in relation to the Kony 2012 campaign, which led to an international critique that African LGBTI activists have been similarly (despite its different context) pointing toward in the last years. Ironically, the Kony 2012 campaign was likely supported by many people who had demanded development aid cuts to the very same Ugandan government—due to its approach to homosexuality—that was now deemed worthy of financial, logistic, and military support.^{Footnote 16}

Similarly, the problematic role of the new media in political life must be kept in mind in all political engagements. As Jack Halberstam says, “protest [now] shapes itself around new social media formats that favor the remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech, form over content” (2012:183). This new visibility—and, in a way, this new easiness and effortlessness of protests and petitions—allows us to engage in discussions about politics on a global scale. Stating one’s own political position is only a mouse click away. But what does an ethical approach to these not necessarily new, but rather intensified, possibilities of political mobilizing look like?

A politics of alliance that is set out in online petitions not only raises questions about visibility and representation, but also highlights the very question of the political: What is constituted and defined as political? What is defined as queer politics? Who is constituted as a political subject? What are the (theoretical, geographical, legal, cultural, economic, social) references that mediate our political positions? Whose reference points are we using? And who is the target of that framework? Linked to this is the question of the globalization of movements, demands, actions, and legal frameworks—not only in order to get international financial support, but also the moral support needed. How do we relate and refer to each other? To each other’s desires?

In this context I would like to point briefly to a response to the global visualization of hate crimes that is markedly different from the one proposed by Avaaz. In Zanele Muholi’s recent film Difficult Love (2010), which was completed and screened at numerous film festivals worldwide before the Avaaz petition was launched, Millicent Gaika appears shortly after the attack and speaks for herself. By focusing on Gaika’s story among other stories that deal not only with homophobia, but also with the intensities of love, desire, and pleasure, Muholi’s film resists a reductive narrative about South African life, especially an image of black lesbians living in constant terror. She offers possibilities of representation and discourse that go beyond the limiting context of hate crimes to point to the complexity and diversity of same-sex desires while assembling an archive of shadow stories, histories, languages, and meanings.^{Footnote 17}

The political strategies we employ affect our understanding of ourselves in relation to others and how we want to appear before others—not only to the immediate “other,” but to an “other” that could be anywhere in the world. They also affect our understanding of others: how we make them appear, and hence make them intelligible. In the online petitions and the responses they evoked among South African LGBTI organizations, we see not only the need for an applied ethics in virtual politics, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the need to historicize the subjectivity with which we attempt to speak to, or speak of, others. Questioning the strategies of visibility at work in global activism—or the hypervisibility of African queer bodies in online forums on hate crime—draws attention, at the same time, to the multiplicity of local and transnational LGBTI activists organizing throughout the African continent, as well as new academic scholarship on nonheteronormative sexualities and socialities and the increasingly rich cultural archive created by African cultural activists. It further encourages a reading of history that questions what is considered normative and allows us to embrace new concepts, theories, improvisations, and collaborations that enrich us all. The actual and the virtual hence remain crucial sites for the elaboration of these practices and processes—both online and offline.