Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women

Autori

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/23089

Parole chiave:

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah; The Sex Lives of African Women; transnational archive; Afroqueerness; heteropatriarchy; sexual freedom

Abstract

In her anthology, The Sex Lives of African Women (2021), Ghanaian writer and blogger Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah includes thirty-two stories of Black African and Afro-descendant women of different ages and sexual orientations to openly discuss queer and identity issues, family and religious dynamics, sexual freedom and pleasure, and abuses and resistance against heteropatriarchal structures. In this paper, I will first introduce Sekyiamah as a newly emerging African voice in the contemporary writing panorama and briefly examine her story collection. Second, I will discuss how gender and sex were conceived in Africa in precolonial times and how queerness and lesbianism are interpreted in the African feminist tradition. Third, I will show how Sekyiamah’s anthology can be read as a transnational Afroqueer archive by discussing some of the stories included in her volume. Significantly, I will draw on Chantal Zabus’s conceptualisation of “margins” (Zabus 31-32) to capture those spaces of free expression, openness, and resistance against colonial, nationalist, and heteropatriarchal power structures from which Afrosporic women express and manifest their often “dissenting” identities, exercise their agency, and fight for their fundamental human rights.

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Biografia autore

Isabella Villanova, University of Vienna

Isabella Villanova Isabella Villanova is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut für Afrikawissenschaften of the University of Vienna (Austria). Previously, she worked as an Adjunct Professor of English literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia (Italy) and was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds (UK). In 2021, she earned a PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua (Italy), and in 2022, she was selected as a winner in the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her articles appeared in Il Tolomeo, De Genere, and From the European South, and her first monograph, titled The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance, will be published by Peter Lang in 2024. Isabella’s research interests cover Anglophone African and diaspora literature, contemporary women’s fiction and non-fiction, postcolonial literature, World literature, feminist theories, gender and queer studies, affect studies, and trauma studies.

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Pubblicato

2024-05-30

Come citare

Villanova, Isabella. 2024. «Afroqueerness, Heteropatriarchy, and Transnationality: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women». Altre Modernità, n. 31 (maggio):147-64. https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/23089.

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Saggi Ensayos Essais Essays