A01=George Paul Meiu
Africa
Author_George Paul Meiu
Category=JBSF2
Category=JBSJ
citizenship
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
homophobia
intimacy
objects
queer theory
rescue
sexuality
Product details
- ISBN 9780226830582
- Weight: 313g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Dec 2023
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
George Paul Meiu is professor of anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Ethno-erotic Economies, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
