FIRMING UP THE ‘OTHER’ GENDER: DISCOURSE ON SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL MINORITIES IN KENYA
Abstract
Premised on Gayle Rubin’s model, this paper explores the development and positioning of ‘transgressive sexualities’ (from the African standpoint) along the “Blessed” versus “Damned” sexualities continuum in The Sex Hierarchy. While the African political and socio-cultural terrain provides the background to the discourse herein, the main conversations around the topic are pigeon-holed on the Kenyan case. The paper recognises the conjoined relationship between gender and sexuality; distinct yet layered and overlapping one another and at the same time, endowed with the capacity to prescribe and proscribe sexual relationships and expressions in different contexts. The paper takes the reader through sexuality journey in Africa, and interrogates the notion of an essentialized and monolithic ‘African sexuality’ that is intolerant to other sexual identities and orientations, save for its ‘Africanist’ heteronormativity. Zeroing on Kenya, the paper gives an analysis of how a new constitutional dispensation threw a lifeline in the rights of sexual minorities across the country. Using a number of cases mainly drawn from the print media, the paper highlights the struggles of an energised sexual minority (and lobby groups) in pursuit of legitimacy and recognition in an otherwise hostile social frame.
Keywords: Sexuality, The Sex Hierarchy, Sexual minorities, LGBTI, Kenya, Africa, Culture
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