Making men fall

Queer Power Beyond Anti-Normativity

Bibliographic Data

ID2103656
AuthorsThomas Hendriks (0000-0002-7676-6171)
Year2021
Volume91
Issue3
Pages398-417
Publication date2021-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s000197202100022x
OpenAlexW3161412277
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited40

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought of in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. 'Transgression' thereby becomes an implicit or explicit act of resistanceagainstthe norm. This is particularly clear in Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has - paradoxically - become a field-defining norm. Yet such strong anti-normativity can become a liability when trying to do justice to actually existing queer dynamics in past and present African realities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork among sexually dissident young men who call themselves 'fioto' in urban Democratic Republic of Congo, this article shifts the always already oppositional relationship between queerness and normativity - not by arguing that queer is normal too or by showing that queer lives produce their own norms alongside heteronormativity, but by suggesting that queerness is a potentialofnormativity, rather than an opposition to it. It specifically thinks with two groups offiotofriends in Kisangani to show how and why norms generated their own queerness - as something that was already there as an inherent dimension of their own dynamism and multiplicity

Ethnography · Heteronormativity · Norm (philosophy · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Land Rights and Reforms · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy