Abstract
Since 2008, Senegal has witnessed an unprecedented backlash against homosexual and transgender individuals. The publication of images from an alleged gay wedding that year followed by a monolithically homophobic response by religious and political leaders set the stage for pervasive surveillance and violence against gender and sexual nonconforming Senegalese. Despite, and largely because of this phenomenon, scholarship investigating gender and sexuality in Senegal is sparse. As Babacar M’Baye notes in the Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies, Senegalese scholars understandably tend to ignore gender and sexuality out of fear of being associated with the identities that the research would examine.
Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies, edited by M’Baye and Besi Brillian Muhonja, boldly delves into a number of the social, cultural, and political arenas where sexual and gender norms are defined, enacted and resisted in postcolonial Senegal. The contributors investigate sites ranging from the government and schools to the soccer field and social media to not only describe the causes and effects of the ongoing crisis but also to elaborate on practices of resistance that draw upon indigenous worldviews and tenets of Islam. Crucially, the collection offers locally grounded frameworks for future studies just as it theorizes fascinating intersections between LGBTQ+ identities with Islam and postcolonial socioeconomic conditions that might span beyond the nation-state of Senegal. The collection renders homogenous, heteronormative, and essentializing perspectives impossible to maintain. Instead, nuanced studies that do justice to the vast diversity of Senegal’s past and present are modelled.
Central to the collection is the contested figure of the goordjiggen, the Wolof word that translates to ‘man-woman’. In her essay on ‘the invention of the homosexual’, Ayo Coly explains how the term, which previously referred to gender nonconformity, came to signify homosexuality following the events of 2008 and how homosexuality was framed as disposable life, antithetical to the values of Senegalese nationhood and Islam. M’Baye’s essay examines shifting roles of the goordjiggen in films and novels spanning the 1970s to early 2000s to demonstrate how cultural producers humanized the goordjiggen. While M’Baye and Coly insist that the marginalization of gender and sexual dissidents took on drastically new proportions post-2008, Ellen Foley’s interview with public intellectual Cheikh Ibrahima Niang offers a different perspective. Niang, who has worked on issues related to gender and sexuality for much of his 40-year career, identifies the first backlash against homosexuals and sex workers in the 1960s. He describes the vulnerability and social exclusion of goorjdiggens in the 1990s and early 2000s as he became more involved with LGBTQ social networks; the need to hold focus group meetings in his office from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. because it was the only time and space where homosexuals felt safe gathering. Niang’s divergent perspective from that of M’Baye and Coly amplifies one of the book’s strengths: its capacity to hold contradictions rather than attempting to provide a single narrative.
Existing scholarship on gender and sexual dissidence in Senegal tends to centre on male subjects while scholarship on Senegalese womanhood focuses on gender inequality without probing the coherence of the category ‘woman’ nor examining female sexuality. With some significant exceptions, this collection reproduces these tendencies. Coly concludes her essay with the recognition that women who have sex with women are absent from Senegalese scholarship, but her failure to elaborate is unsatisfying. M’Baye focuses solely on gender nonconforming males in cultural production, and Juliana Friend offers a fascinating analysis of the dehumanizing pitfalls within a local NGO’s strategy, reliant on digital technology, to provide public health education to men who have sex with men. Others probe various facets of women’s lives, including Amy Porter’s examination of women participants in entrepreneurial training programmes, Ruth Evans’s study of Serer women’s property rights and the burdens of widowhood, Kadidia Sy’s championing of female friendship in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, and Susan Telingator and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks’s work on increased women in parliament. While each of these essays offers invaluable insights into the ways in which women creatively respond to gendered oppression, Beth Packer’s ‘Queering the “Greater Jihad”’ deftly takes on the uncharted territory of gender nonconformity among Senegalese assigned female at birth. Packer examines female soccer players’ blurring of femininity and masculinity both on and off the field. Her ethnographic research reveals the quotidian epithets that masculine females endure and theorizes their resistance as stemming from the Sufi valuation of enduring suffering. Female soccer players publicly perform their bodies in ways that disrupt gender and sexual norms prescribed in part by Islam from within a Sufi framework of resistance, thereby challenging perceptions of gender nonconformity and Muslim faith as incompatible.
Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies exemplifies exciting new directions in Senegalese gender and sexuality studies, opening up more questions for future scholars to take on than it provides answers. Not strictly for scholars of Senegal, the collection puts forth themes and methods that resonate across postcolonial contexts. It demonstrates that it is no longer viable to study colonialism, neocolonialism, Islam in Africa, and other phenomena without recognizing how these are intimately intertwined with gender and sexual hierarchies.
