QUEER OBJECTS TO THE RESCUE, intimacy and citizenship in Kenya

230pp., illus., paperback, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023

ISBN: 9780226830582

Explores the objects that leaders, media, and civil society groups in Kenya have used to represent the perceived threat homosexual behaviour poses to a 'virile' construction of national masculinity.

“This sophisticated critical study of queerness, objecthood, and subjecthood offers novel approaches and languages for scholarly engagement with identities situated in social, cultural, and economic politics, histories of inclusion and exclusion, and complex fabrications of (intimate) citizenships.” Besi Muhonja, James Madison University

“Filled with smart arguments and clean-edged prose,Queer Objects to the Rescue makes a signature contribution to the literature on non-normative sexualities in Africa. It maps out novel terrain for semiotic and new materialism theory, as well as for queer and African studies, and it richly unsettles simplistic accounts of homophobia and citizenship in Kenya today.” Charles Piot, Duke University

George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and the author of Ethno-erotic Economies.