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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya

Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya

Meiu, George Paul

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 022683056X
ISBN13: 9780226830568
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Dec 20 2023
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.

Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the homosexual threat they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially virile construction of national masculinity.

In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.

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