Frontiers and pioneers in (the study of) queer experiences in Africa Introduction

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term 'pioneer' for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theorization based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions – as it always has – only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication, a Euro-American centre. 'Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as "data" or "evidence," not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies' (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in 'suave', for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to 'define' African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers.

Inspired by Francis Nyamnjoh's and Stella Nyanzi's work, we argue that studying the quotidian is a critical first step. Even as we follow up on an existing body of literature on queer sexualities in African societies, this literature shows how the investigation of the everyday is easily subsumed by other concerns; our aim is thus to centre people's practices and experiences as a focal axis of theorizing. We borrow Nyamnjoh's metaphor of frontier Africans to deal with a few lingering questions regarding the study of sexuality more broadly.

We directly respond to Nyanzi's call to calibrate the study of gender and sexuality as part and parcel of people's everyday lives rather than following the grid of a global LGBT+ discourse, which often endorses a taxonomic approach that labels people in terms of intrinsic psychic traits they are believed to possess (Nyanzi 2014). According to Nyanzi, erotic desires and gendered subjectivities can be grasped only by focusing on the breadth of people's lives and their interconnectedness:

[The] canvas of possibilities demanding queer production of knowledge from Africa includes relationships, pleasure, intimacy, parenthood, education, voice and expression, representation and visibility, housing and shelter, movement, migration, exile and asylum, employment, income generation, livelihoods, family, ritual, health, spirituality, religion, faith, violence, security and safety, nationalism, ethnicity, and globalization.

(Nyanzi 2014: 63)

As Nyanzi states, reflecting on her own experiences, queerness cannot be neatly defined because same-sex and cross-sex desires and lives are intimately connected. We take up Nyanzi's suggestion to move away from studying sexuality as forming the core of one's self or one's identity and, instead, study the ways in which people play into the inherent instability of normative structures. Moreover, she invites scholars of queer sexualities to analyse normative discourse not only as descriptive, as if they illustrate actual praxis, but also always in relation to what they represent or speak for. For instance, as Gaudio and Pierce rightly observe, the virulent homophobic discourse that swept over Nigeria in the 2010s cannot be explained only by the presence of people with same-sex proclivities, cultural reasons and/or religious change, but that longer-standing moral anxiety and political conflict are important in explaining the surge (Gaudio 2014; Pierce 2016). How, then, to theorize from...