Description
Book SynopsisThe Economies of Queer Inclusion explores the formation of relationships between US-based transnational human rights actors and grassroots LGBTI activists in Kampala, Uganda. In doing so, it exposes the unintended consequences of finance-based connections and proposes alternative forms of transnational activism.
Trade ReviewI love this book. Rodriguez shares her passionate and erudite “counter-story” to the harmful tropes circulating in the West about “African homophobia” and, by extension, imputed black savagery and white superiority. An autoethnography grounded in wide-ranging critical scholarship, it provides a powerful wake-up call to those gay rights activists in the West who assume their interventions in Africa are necessarily needed, wanted, and helpful. It is also a deeply-moving clarion call for queer people of color in Uganda and the United States, and in Africa and the West more broadly, to develop their own languages of resistance to homophobic nationalism, to white supremacy, to neo-imperialism, and to the corrosive class politics that, until now, have only been discreetly alluded to studies of queer activism in Africa. Rodriguez makes a major contribution to our understanding of current weaknesses in transnational queer activism, and hence to imagining ways out of the impasse. Right on!
-- Marc Epprecht, Queen's University
Table of ContentsPreface: Considering a Methodology of Connection
Introduction: Queer Organizing for Full Citizenship
1: Homophobic Nationalism: The Development of Sodomy Legislation
2: Invisibility Matters: Visibility Management in a Transnational Age
3: Access Granted: Mainstream Methods of Transnational Organizing
4: The Economies of Queer Inclusion
5: Centering Afro-Diasporic Organizing for Transnational Futures
Conclusion
Bibliography
