Queer Southern Africa : Temporalities, Bodies, and Belonging

This book asks what it means to be queer in Southern Africa today, bringing together bold and original scholarship to examine the messy, creative, and often precarious realities of queer life. It will interest researchers and students in gender, queer and sexuality studies, African studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science.

This book asks what it means to be queer in Southern Africa today, bringing together bold and original scholarship to examine the messy, creative, and often precarious realities of queer life across the region. Moving beyond narrow framings of visibility and legal recognition, the volume centres queer embodiment, lived experience, and the everyday negotiations of space, time, intimacy, and belonging in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The volume foregrounds the diverse ways queer subjects navigate shifting political, cultural, spiritual, and economic landscapes in Southern Africa. Drawing on queer theory, decolonial thought, feminist critique, and indigenous knowledge systems, the book uncovers the complex relationships between queerness, temporality, kinship, spirituality, labour, mobility, and survival. It explores issues as varied as ancestral callings, queer kinship structures, spiritual practices, digital intimacies, the politics of public sex, economic precarity, migration, and communal care, demonstrating how queer communities across the region continue to remake social worlds despite ongoing structural violence, exclusion, and moral regulation. Rather than treating Southern Africa as a homogeneous space, the volume remains attentive to the uneven histories, languages, and political conditions that shape queer experiences across the region. In doing so, it offers an important intervention into African queer studies by foregrounding relationality, affect, embodiment, and world-making as central to understanding contemporary queer life. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, African studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science.