Genders, Sexualities, and Complexities in Africa

This book’s significance is in its African-centred border crossing overt and covert forces working against genders and sexualities, reinforcing endemic gender and sexual based complexities. Pragmatically, sexualities and genders in Africa remain contested and an area of power and control contestations in both the private and public spheres. Gender based violence and femicide (GBVF), in particular, continue to escalate, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such GBVF, at most, affects young women, migrants, LGBTIQIA+ people, sex workers, informal street traders, and widows, amongst others. This is happening at a time when the feminist and women’s movements in Africa are experiencing fragmentations and factions that pull and push organising to the margins of prejudice internally, thereby exacerbating an act of ‘subordinated inclusion’. In this context, the term ‘subordinated inclusion’ connotes another form of complexity where the ‘subaltern’ has been brought inside a room as an act of inclusion yet systemically subordinated through structure and obedience, thereby compromising agency. This complexity occurs in private and public domains, where a continuum of contestations between structure and agency is sustained. Consequently, power struggles emerge and proliferate unabated into gendered and sexualised complexities, including relations of state, coloniality, apartheid, prejudice, marginalization, capitalism and democracy. This book thus strives to surface these contestations and complexities and how they continue to thrive in an era that seeks another way possible, a way out, a jump off, a manner of dealing and an exit from the status quo.