BSAS Seminar: George Paul Meiu, Queer Objects and Intimate Citizenship in Kenya
George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. He is Associate in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where, until 2022, he was a tenured, full professor. Meiu’s research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; ethnicity, belonging and citizenship; mobility, memory, and materiality; and the political economy of East Africa and Eastern Europe.
Main content
In this talk, I examine forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged and transformed in response to growing anti-homosexual violence. Following Uganda’s infamous “kill-the-gays” bill in 2009, leaders in Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania have called on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality, a “vice” many saw as “un-African.” However, in everyday life, this alleged homosexual threat is not easy either to identify or pin down. To make the homosexual body a more stable target of outrage and violence, leaders, media, civil society groups, and citizens have deployed a vast set of unlikely objects. For example, they depict homosexuality as a “foreign plastic” that “pollutes” African lives; a contagion that ruptures male bodies, leaving them incontinent, in need of adult diapers; or an outcome of the growing depletion of nguvu za kiume, “male-power,” a material substance said to sustain hetero-masculine bodies. Objects such as plastics, diapers, or “male-power” may appear trivial to the violent politics of homophobia. I suggest that, to the contrary, their poetic deployment in rumor and political rhetoric constitutes the homosexual body for targeted repudiation.