‘Be Wary of Working Boys’
The Cultural Production of Queer Youth in Today’s West Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23708277 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Noah Tsika (0000-0001-8516-356X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Pages | 239-250 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Queer Youth and Media Cultures (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9781137383556_17 |
| OpenAlex | W2498816252 |
| ISBN | 9781137383556 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
In recent years, Western media outlets have upheld sub-Saharan African countries as tourist destinations for gay and lesbian travellers, while simultaneously positioning these countries as hotbeds of heterosexism and homophobia. At the same time, however, African media industries have generated a veritable explosion of sophisticated depictions of queer youth, particularly in Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. In an alarming number of instances, the Western-authored ‘elevation’ of these countries to the status of tourist magnets has failed to dispense with essentialist condescension, the belief that formerly benighted black Africans are now beginning, if just barely, to recognize that homosexuality is not a harbinger of doom or a metonym for the devil, or that same-sex erotic attraction exists at all. Such accounts tend to ignore the contributions of contemporary youth communities to local West African media productions. They tend to ignore, in other words, the fact that young queer Africans are themselves responsible for inspiring queer visibility, in many cases by rejecting imported Western humanitarian discourses that, however well-intentioned, are embarrassingly blind to local realities. Young West Africans have therefore worked to ensure, in a variety of ways and with a range of results, that their peers, and particularly their elders, will have to grapple with local manifestations of sexual prejudice. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Heterosexism · Lesbian · Political science · Prejudice (legal term) · Queer · Sociology · Tourism · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Sex work and related issues
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2019 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |