Queer Objects to the Rescue

Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya

By: George Paul Meiu

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Paperback | 13 December 2023 | Edition Number 1

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Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.29 x 1.52 x 0.18

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Queer Objects to the Rescue is brilliantly written, and it provides us with a resilient scaffolding for theorizing queer valance in Africa." * S. N. Nyeck, University of Colorado Boulder *
"This sophisticated critical study of queerness, objecthood, and subjecthood offers novel approaches and languages for scholarly engagement with identities situated in social, cultural, and economic politics, histories of inclusion and exclusion, and complex fabrications of (intimate) citizenships." * Besi Muhonja, James Madison University *
"Filled with smart arguments and clean-edged prose, Queer Objects to the Rescue makes a signature contribution to the literature on non-normative sexualities in Africa. It maps out novel terrain for semiotic and new materialism theory, as well as for queer and African studies, and it richly unsettles simplistic accounts of homophobia and citizenship in Kenya today." * Charles Piot, Duke University *

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