Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story

In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstructs the queer person as a human subject worth the dignity that they are often denied. In the article, I analyse a selection of six short stories from the collections Queer Africa 2: New Stories and Fairytales for Lost Children to demonstrate how these stories function as prosthesis for queer people in disabling societies.

Queers, Gals, Chaps, Chicks, and Lads

This chapter examines queer fiction. Although various in form, these stories share common concerns. They question the naturalness of binaries such as masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness, and heterosexuality and homosexuality. By emphasizing that identity has no essence or stable ground, and by presenting subjectivity as unfixed, multiple, and in process, queer fiction reflects the view that gender and sex are discursive constructs and that identity is performative — a matter of ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’, and an endless state of becoming. Further, queer fiction stresses discontinuities between sex, gender, and desire, and disputes heterosexual models of gender polarity and sexual difference. It privileges ambiguity, contradiction, illegibility, and incoherence.