Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship. Edited by S. N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. Pp. 302. $29.95 paper.In 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on International Human Rights Day stating: Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.1 This evocation of global sexual cultural norms revealed a new dimension of U.S. foreign policy that sanctioned queer subjecthood, and like many ideological campaigns before it, evoked a need for African enlightenment. The Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe warned against dichotomizing systems that pose as universalizing, which should make us skeptical of processes in which the primitive is invited to join civilization.2 Echoing this caution against constituting norms of sexual realities, S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht have released Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship, a sharply insightful rejoinder to both contemporary geopolitical debates and established scholarship on how African sexual minorities act as legally entitled subjects with regard to their status within international human rights frameworks or in the context of their injuries and the social prejudices to which they have been subject. Building on theories introduced by those like Joseph Massad, Ann Stoler, Sara Ahmed, and Jasbir Puar, Sexual Diversity in Africa provides a range of insight from a focused group of scholars on the state of LGBTI experiences in Africa vis-a-vis nationalism, neocolonialism, and globalization.Throughout the twentieth century, African communities and nations crafted identities in response to multiple stimuli: trans-national religious discourses on morality and respectability, local cultural campaigns to embed tradition into law, and international movements to build consensus on rights and dignity. In the current era, it is clear that LGBTI people are part of international policy discussions, but they have also become salient features within national consciousness. With the exception of Olajide Akanji and Marc Epprecht's introduction, and Epprecht's analysis of the discursive formation of African sexuality in Chapter 3, the chapters of this volume all operate squarely within the nation-state framework when considering the episteme or ethnopractice of sexual behavior, orientation, and/or identity. The chapters explore Gambia, South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, Canada (as a nation that has admitted African sexual minority asylum seekers), and Mali. This admittedly short roster of states still provides in-depth engagement with the sexual rights politics, sexual epistemologies, or sexual disciplinary mechanisms of the societies and their governments that constitute national cultures in Africa.In what is arranged as the third chapter but could equally serve as the volume's introduction, Epprecht masterfully details how western scholars, colonial authorities, and other foreign experts have dominated, restructured, and assumed authority over knowledge of African sexuality. Epprecht examines African sexuality as a discourse in early colonial investigations and demonstrates continuities as well as shifts in contemporary ethnographies and empirical studies. Epprecht allows us to understand the historical construction of the indecent act or individual and the emergence of current practices of renovation, or alternatively, castigation of such indecency. Epprecht's schema gives the reader rich historical insight into how African sexuality became-and remains-a subdiscipline of scholarly inquiry. Moving from accounts of society, sexuality, and textuality in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Africa to narratives of shared sexual identification relevant to the formation of local, transnational, and digital communities, his chapter provides a critical entree into interrogating the presence of queemess and the diversity of response to it within African nations. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".