Book Launch | Dr Gibson Ncube @AfOx fellow

Speaker: Gibson Ncube, @AfOx visiting fellow

Moderators: Dorothee Boulanger (University of Oxford), Kezia Mbonye (University of Oxford)

Ncube, G. (2022). Queer Bodies in African Films. Makhanda (South Africa): NISC.

Queer Bodies in African Films makes two overarching interventions. First, the book focuses on how queer bodies in films are texts. As sites invested with multiple and often overlapping discourses and narratives, queer bodies in films textualise silenced narratives and histories. They are inscribed with more than just desire, eroticism and sexuality. Second, this book sets out to read selected queer films from North Africa against and together with some from sub-Saharan Africa. It brings into productive conversation these broad regions of the continent, which in African Studies, are often demarcated along linguistic and geographic lines. This makes it possible to demonstrate how queer bodies, in their multiplicity, are disruptive figures whose materiality calls for a rethinking of how gender and sexual identities are not just performed and staged but also constructed and embodied.

In examining diverse films in various languages and from different parts of the African continent, Queer Bodies in Africa Films shows that queer African experiences and cultural productions have developed beyond the hegemony of South Africa. Furthermore. its nuanced reading of films from different geographic zones and time frames contends that a focus on the body allows for a unique understanding of what queerness is and means within the context of Africa.

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