"Not Simple Homophobia": African Same-Sex Desires, Politics, and the Limit of Homosexual Rights

To make the claim that there is not a universalized form of homophobia might strike some as strange. In fact, it might strike others as even stranger that what constitutes homophobia in one geopolitical space does not translate seamlessly to another geopolitical space. And if homophobia is in question, the what and the how of the idea of homosexuality are also in question. What is a homosexual and what is an African homosexual? Neville Hoad's African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization asks us to think differently and make strangely unfamiliar some practices, ideas, and conceptual claims, not to mention their attendant political positions, strategies, and announcements, based on what it is we think we know about homosexuality. Thus, Hoad offers a response to such claims of homophobia and the rights claims stemming from them in addition to the fashioning of same-sex citizenry in southern Africa as a complex condition of neoliberal irrational times. Hoad's intervention, which takes South Africa as its case study, offers readers insights into the complicated and complexly shifting dynamics of sexuality, its making as an identity, and its political and cultural claims from a range of different positions. Ultimately, Hoad argues that the conditions under which we make sense of debates over homosexuality, culture, tradition, religion, and HIV/AIDS in the southern African region "is not simple homophobia" (42).

African Intimacies is a genre-bending analysis of the breakdown of the category homosexual and the limits of rights discourses in a universalist frame of reference for homosexuality, as much as it is an analysis of how sexuality—especially nonheterosexuality—is policed, made deviant, and abrogated in modern societies in which very particular notions of citizenship are given priority in reproducing one nation as distinct from other nations. In Hoad's skilled analyses, literature and the literary meet political and religious events, pronouncements, and discourses. Thus, Hoad rethinks the archive of homosexual knowledge and elaborates the stakes of those archives and events that require careful thought if we are to make sense of the modern claims invoking homosexuality as a basis for our studies. Importantly as well, the rescue of an assumed homosexual oppressed African body as subject in our politics, policies, and studies is highlighted as problematically constituted by Hoad's elaborations of the archive. Hoad's work represents cultural studies at its best, moving across a range of materials to demonstrate the contextual, positional, and relational dynamics of sexuality and claims to identity based on sexuality. In this regard, Hoad can both produce homosexuals and call their existence into question by recourse to a conceptual terrain that takes self-naming seriously while refusing to subordinate other ways of naming and importantly ways of being in the world to a universal category of homosexual. It is with such thoughtful analyses that Hoad's project does not offer an apologia for complicated, frustrating, and sometimes hateful discussions about same-sex desire in southern Africa. Yet he also offers searing critiques of Western universalizing homosexual discourses that seek to render all same-sex desire intelligible on its own terms.

Crucial to Hoad's engagement with southern African same-sex desire and practices are both the expansion and the elaboration of the archive. In the first chapter, Hoad returns both to the physical archive and to the textual archive to meditate on how the archive simultaneously makes homosexuality appear and disappear as an African practice. The chapter's importance results from how Hoad situates questions of history, tradition, Western colonial and imperial power, and Christianity in an elaborated and broader archive as those moments rebound in more contemporary conversations, debates, and analyses in the book's later chapters. Hoad's work points to the ways in which tradition, modernity, religion, and culture slide across each other, securing various arguments in their specific context but promiscuously borrowing from each other in ways that always require careful and thoughtful unpacking. For example, how the Anglican African bishops take up Christianity as...