The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda

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The Anti-Homosexuality (dubbed Kill the Gays) Bill of 2009 propelled Uganda to the forefront of global media. In its initial manifestation, the Bill threatened to penalize aggravated homosexuality with the death penalty. The media attention earned by the proposed legislation opened avenues for transnational cooperation and communication between US-based Human and LGBTI Rights organizations and kuchu (or LGBTI) Ugandans. The Economies of Queer Inclusion focuses on this transnational relationship and the complications that arise when international currency and professionalization transform grassroots organizing.

This book excavates how transnational advocacy, which aims to empower LGBTI rights activism, actually restructures and, in some cases, limits local movements. With interview and ethnographic data with activists in Kampala, Uganda and New York City, the research highlights how the introduction of international attention and funding causes organizations to restructure their movement goals and strategies in order to best attract desired partners. The funder-funded relationship causes both local discord and transnational divestment from alternative forms of organizing. The research presents a compelling, counter-narrative that exposes that the development of this economy did not occur because of the Anti-Homosexuality, but rather inspired the legislation and then peaked in the five years following.

As an engaged, ethnographic look into a social justice movement, the text explores organizational structures and activist strategies in order to critique and strengthen future mobilization. Accordingly, the text applies various sociological and critical race theories to provide an incisive and in-depth exploration of a powerful political moment.

Reviews

I 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!

Author Bio

SM Rodriguez is assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Hofstra University.