African Urban Sexualities After Queer Visibilities

Abstract

AbstractThis article outlines why there exist important opportunities to think through what research on African urban sexualities—and specifically non-heteronormative sexualities—may mean moving forward. By looking back at the text Queer Visibilities that largely focused on articulating some of the relationships between the urban and sexuality over a decade ago in Cape Town, this article suggests at least three key opportunities in which future scholarship may wish to explore African urban sexualities in the current moment. These opportunities circulate around new theoretical insights that emerge from the South that may speak to but are not beholden to theories from the North, the urgent need for further empirical work on the ways sexuality interfaces with urbanisation dynamics on the continent, and to think through and give space to broader approaches to document the relationship between sexuality and the urban that include but also extend beyond more ‘traditional’ social science methods. This article then explores these opportunities in relation to the interventions that follow in this special issue.