A queer perspective on emergent sexualities and dissident masculinities in Kisangani.

This research project is the first in-depth ethnographic study of sexual and gender dissidence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It specifically looks at the everyday performances of “emergent sexualities” and “dissident masculinities” in the urban context of Kisangani and gives visibility to the lives of people who are all too often considered “inauthentic” Africans. From the perspective of self-identified “gay” or fioto men, it takes an innovating “queer” look at the dominant sex/gender system and investigates how explicitly dissident performances of masculinity undermine hegemonic gender ideologies and are exposed to various forms of homophobic violence. At the same time, however, such a perspective reveals the considerable scope for same-sex desire within an urban popular culture in which emergent sexualities are increasingly re-defined as “connected” to a modern globalized world. This project therefore analyses how performances of sexual and gender dissidence are simultaneously subversive and productive of dominant masculinities. Foregrounding the inherently fluid production of desire in Kisangani and the conceptual limitations of binary homo/hetero thinking, it demonstrates the fertility and value of queer theory for the anthropology of gender and sexuality. But rather than simply applying queer insights to Africa, it aims to rethink them from Africa by offering the much needed empirical base to go beyond queer theory’s implicit western ethnocentric assumptions.