Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship: Reflections on African Diasporic Queer Imaginaries

This article interrogates how the bordering processes of both human bodies and geographical spaces impact on the citizenship rights of African queer subjects as represented in Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children (2013) and Queer Africa 2: New Stories (2017), edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin. I argue that, while exile is often represented as an alternative safe space for African queer subjects away from the continent’s heteropatriarchal authorities, narratives of suffering, alienation, and loss still dominate diasporic queer African literature. This suggests that exile may not be enabling enough in granting agency for the unthreatened performance of queer genders and sexualities since vulnerability from homophobic violence still manifests as a debilitating challenge beyond the borders of certain nation-states. The short stories analysed here establish that the denial of full citizenship rights to queer Africans does not begin at the level of their exclusion from some African geographical spaces, but rather, such exclusions begin with imagined geographies of the human body that create limits to acceptable notions of gender and sexual performance.