- Pleasure in Queer African Studies:Screenshots of the Present
When I was in Luzira Women's Prison, I really really really missed my dildo. Sometimes my desire was so overwhelming that I cried as other inmates snored deep into the night. You see, masturbation is forbidden in prison. { … } There is no pleasure, no sweetness, no blissful moment, left in Uganda for the masses living oppressed by Museveni's dictatorship. And so, tonight, I will assert my rights to dildo-based adult pleasure. { … } Should the state drag me back to jail, I will be a satiated woman.
—Stella Nyanzi, Facebook post, May 20, 2017
In the context of puritanical, authoritarian religious and political regimes, pleasure has emerged as a key term for African queer scholarship and creative production—a form of defiance expressed vividly in Ugandan feminist scholar and activist Stella Nyanzi's brave assertion of the right to masturbate, above.1 Nyanzi was jailed on April 10, 2017, for a previous Facebook post characterizing President Museveni as a "pair of buttocks."2 Drawing on the pleasures [End Page 659] of taboo-breaking, the well-turned phrase, and the performativity of social media, her Facebook posts articulate a form of activism that contrasts with the sober respectability of most human rights discourse. In the numerous comments responding to Nyanzi's post about masturbation, there are jokes, expressions of support, earnest discussion of sex toys, attempted flirtation, some horrified disapproval, close readings of her statement as national allegory, and ad hoc theorizations of pleasure and humor. Her post provokes an informal, collective making of new political and discursive pleasures.
The brief series of "screenshots" that I offer here, from my Anglophone location in the global North, is far from a complete account of African discourses about sexuality, and is not a close reading of one particular text or location; instead, I hope to show how thinking pleasure is on the agenda for a range of theorists and artists. Nyanzi's insistence on self-pleasuring, for example, echoes a 2011 blog post titled "Masturbation is Great!" by Kenya-based scholar Keguro Macharia. Macharia's blog, Gukira, offers a crucial unfolding body of work on, among other things, "the radical politics a queer focus on pleasure can produce." Macharia points out that pleasure, so rooted in the body, can offer an alternative language to the abstraction of human rights discourse ("Queer African Studies"),3 and his writing itself deliberately departs from the norms of academic prose to beautiful and arresting effect. His post about masturbation critiques a Kenyan advice column condemning the practice, by describing the pleasures he has experienced masturbating with others, and reflects on the pedagogical possibilities of the social life of pleasure:
Something interesting (even useful) happens when we are able to envision our bodies and those that surround us as being capable of intense pleasure { … } in understanding a capacity for pleasure as one of the things that binds us. { … } Something interesting (even useful) happens when we are able to multiply the ways we can imagine embodied points of commonality.
(Macharia 2011a)
Pleasure "binds" people together, emerges between us, is deeply part of human sociality—and yet it can also be anti-social. Pleasure can absent you from the immediate world you inhabit—the solitary transports of reading, for example—or absorb you in the present, obliterating the past and the future. Queer theory from the global North has offered many insights on the "self-shattering" nature of sexual pleasures, or, on the other hand, the "uses of the erotic" to care for the self in a hostile world.4 Less discussed within queer [End Page 660] theory, perhaps, are the vast range of cruel pleasures that human beings can derive from hurting, laughing at, and turning away from others. Pleasure is not definitively a "bad feeling" or a virtuous one, conservative or radical; but it can be contested political terrain.
While Nyanzi and Macharia are engaging in conversations with other Africans about sexuality, the current emphasis on pleasure is also a response to the overwhelming negativity of global media representations of Africans, who are more often than not framed in terms of AIDS, sexual violence, or FGM...