Homo-erotic desires, emergent sexualities and dissident masculinities:a queer perspective on the political economy of sex in Kisangani.

Counter-balancing the still heterosexist underpinnings of most Congo research, this project looks at various forms of homo-erotic desire in the urban context of Kisangani. It offers an ethnographic description of the complexities and ambiguities at the heart of everyday constructions of masculinity by highlighting the considerable scope for homo-erotic desire within their largely homosocial contexts of performance. It analyses how these desires, as long as they remain unsaid, do not destabilize hegemonic masculinities but contribute to their maintenance and reproduce a dominant phallic sex/gender system. Moreover, at the margins of this gender system, self-identified gay or homosexual men and boys perform (explicitly gendered) sexual identities. Re-defining themselves as modern or connected (branché) and daily negotiating issues of discretion and respectability, their emergent sexualities are understood in the context of an urban popular culture which contains both virulent forms of homophobia often recoding homosexuality as an occult sectarian practice and implicit homo-erotic possibilities. This research project, far from being an ethnography of a supposedly gay community lurking in the shadows of the city, is a self-consciously queer approach to contemporary urban sexualities and masculinities that foregrounds the fluid production of desire in Kisanganis political economy of sex.

Keywords:Same-sex desire, Sexuality, Masculinity, Homophobia, Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo

Disciplines:Other social sciences