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[Workshop] Researching Gender and Sexuality in Africa Workshop

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Gender and sexuality are among the most critical and productive categories in the analysis of African cultural production, social formation, and political mobilisation. In recent decades, African feminist, gender and queer studies have emerged as highly vibrant and prolific subfields of African Studies at large. Rather than simply applying Western theoretical and political models, these fields also increasingly foreground the ways in which gender and sexuality are assigned meaning and significance in local epistemologies and political struggles, and how this requires a decolonial theorising from Africa. Moreover, current scholarship understands gender and sexuality as intersectional categories, intricately connected to other categories of identity and social location, such as age, class, race, ethnicity, and civil status.

This interdisciplinary LUCAS workshop centres around sharing and discussing current research on gender and sexuality in diverse African contexts and from a range of angles, with a view to collaboratively exploring and thinking through the theoretical, methodological, ethical and political questions at stake.

If you wish to attend this in-person on campus event, please register by email by 14th May latest.

  • Date: Thursday 18 May 2023
  • Time: 9:30-17:00
  • Location: University of Leeds (room TBC)

Presentations

  • Tendai Mangena (University of Leeds): “Bonde (Sex) is not a Taboo Subject in Shona Communities: Some (Decolonial) Provocations”. 
  • Marc Epprecht (Queen’s University, Canada): “Gender Justice and Decolonization in Southern Africa: The Colonial Archive as Ally”.
  • Allison Goebel (Queen’s University, Canada): “Researching Gender in Southern Africa: Blindspots and Gaps for a Feminist Social Science”.
  • Megan Robertson (University of Leeds): “‘I’m Just a Vessel’: Sex and the Sacred in Cape Town Comedy”.
  • Ruth Kelly (University of York): “Using Storytelling to Negotiate Gendered Aspirations in Uganda”.
  • Megan Fourqurean (University of Leeds): “Re-imagining Gender and Tradition in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji”.
  • Isaac Dery (Dombo University, Ghana): “Theorising African Masculinities between Hegemony and Vulnerability: The Case of Dɔɔ Menga Masculinity in Ghana”.
  • Isla Thomson (York University): The Control of Queer African Sexuality in Ghana