Queer Southern African Imaginaries

Introduction

As a Spring 2023 Athena Fellow, I have been working on a project that addresses the disappearance of queer Southern African imaginaries from local and global visual cultures. Queer Zimbabweans at home and in the diaspora face the physical violence of a culture that tends toward hostility to supposedly “unAfrican” sexualities and gender identities. At the same time, the marginalization of queer Zimbabwean imaginaries in local and global visual cultures amounts to a symbolic violence that denies LGBTQ+ Zimbabweans the right to public visibility. In order to speak back to these absences, I wanted to both celebrate and think critically about the representations of LBGTQ+ Zimbabweans that do exist on the margins of these visual cultures. I decided to use the platform Scalar to create a virtual book that does just that.

I chose the title Queer Southern African Imaginaries for my project to emphasize the power of the imagination to envision possible lives and futures for queer people living in and coming from countries like Zimbabwe whose governments are hostile to LGBTQ+ people and relationships, and where queer being is itself often denied by political rhetoric and cultural myths that deem non-heteronormative sexualities “un-African.” While looking at paintings, photography, and media for my project, I came across artists from countries surrounding Zimbabwe who were put into broader conversations with Zimbabwean artists about regional culture and politics. Because of this, I decided to expand the focus of my project to what I called Queer Southern African Imaginaries, looking at photography from Botswana, queer archives in South Africa, and exhibitions in Zambia and Mozambique. In addition to the artistic works, artists, exhibitions and archives that I looked at, I learned about critical approaches to the reading of queer African art and queer African archives. 

Throughout the process of designing my project, I thought a lot about young queer Zimbabweans who may be seeking themselves in visual arts and media and coming up blank––especially children of the diaspora who are likely disconnected from queer Zimbabwean subcultures and whose engagement with the culture of their originary country may be largely or primarily digital, mediated by the kinds of technologies that make a digital humanities project like this possible. I was also initially interested in this challenge because of how revelatory my own engagement with queer African visual culture has been as a queer daughter of the diaspora who grew up feeling anomalous both within my family and within the suburban midwestern environs of my upbringing.

Throughout the course of designing this project, I have developed an interest in learning how to approach the presentation of research and scholarship in ways that are more creative and accessible than the traditional academic paper, especially when it comes to the presentation of socially conscious scholarship. I hope that this Scalar page can be a resource for anyone looking to engage with queer Southern African art and activism, whether that be for reasons that are personal, academic or intellectual, creative, or otherwise.            

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