Homosexuality, politics and Pentecostal nationalism in Zambia

Building upon debates about the politics of nationalism and sexuality in post-colonial Africa, this article highlights the role of religion in shaping nationalist ideologies that seek to regulate homosexuality. It specifically focuses on Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia, where the constitutional declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation has given rise to a form of ‘Pentecostal nationalism’ in which homosexuality is considered to be a threat to the purity of the nation and is associated with the Devil. The article offers an analysis of recent Zambian public debates about homosexuality, focusing on the ways in which the ‘Christian nation’ argument is deployed, primarily in a discourse of anti-homonationalism, but also by a few recent dissident voices. The latter prevent Zambia, and Christianity, from accruing a monolithic depiction as homophobic. Showing that the Zambian case presents a mobilisation against homosexuality that is profoundly shaped by the local configuration in which Christianity defines national identity – and in which Pentecostal-Christian moral concerns and theo-political imaginations shape public debates and politics – the article nuances arguments that explain African controversies regarding homosexuality in terms of exported American culture wars, proposing an alternative reading of these controversies as emerging from conflicting visions of modernity in Africa

Gay Rights, the Devil and the End Times: Public Religion and the Enchantment of the Homosexuality Debate in Zambia

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context

RE: THINKING SEX FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH AFRICA

This article investigates Gayle Rubin's 1984 article “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” as a piece of “traveling theory.” It takes a key concept, “hierarchies of sexual value,” and its representation in a famous graphic, “the charmed circle,” to see what aspects of sexual politics in South Africa Rubin's concept can illuminate, both for the moment in which the essay was written and for the present. While the worlds Rubin's essay can describe have shifted, the essay's analytic power holds.</jats:p

Translated Bodies: Gender Variance, Sexual Desire, and Legal Liberalism

In the Social Theory first guest lecture, Dr. Hoad discusses Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde\u27s memoir, Black, Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008). The memoir offers a series of powerful mediations on embodiment in terms of conceptual binaries that it deploys, refutes and sometimes reworks. Nkabinde elaborates an intricate relationship between embodiment and subjectivity that must hold both the living and the dead, old histories and new geographies, male and female, homo and heteronormativities, urban and rural experience, continuity and rupture in a political order, alienation and belonging, and the competing feelings of being simultaneously possessed and free. By analyzing this memoir, Dr. Road\u27s talk troubles contemporary representations of the intersections of indigenous sexualities and genders, customary law, and democratic sovereignty