Nation, Narrative and Archive: In Search of Queer Histories in Zimbabwe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation argues for a new genealogy for telling the history of queerness in Zimbabwe. State-sponsored histories have created a narrow, nationalist narrative that relegates queerness to the margins. This is a project that resides in those margins. By sinking deep into the spaces that queer bodies create for themselves in those margins, I develop a reading practice that disrupts existing narratives through the analysis of archives as cultural formations and demonstrating how changing how we constitute these formations can lead to narratives that can lead to freedom. I argue that the state’s political homophobia has an outsize role in defining the discourse on homosexuality in Zimbabwe and that this results in trauma-centred narratives or what Keguro Macharia would term negating spaces. Even when scholars focus on counter-narratives, we are still allowing the state to shape the language of the discussion and therefore limit what we can imagine. By being attentive to the myriad of ways that LGBTI Zimbabweans engage in social negotiations of identity, and the stories they tell, I theorize how LGBTI people are defining non-normative sexualities in Zimbabwe. LGBTI people are already actively engaged in the work of articulating distinctively African queer subjectivities. They are already imagining a different story. Through narrative interventions in four moments of queer history in Zimbabwe, I develop a reading practice that draws from Queer African Studies, to allow for a different Queer Zimbabwean narrative, one that centers the freedom and liberation of the marginalized. This reading practice disrupts existing narratives through the analysis of archives as cultural formations and demonstrating how changing how we constitute these formations can lead to narratives that can lead to freedom. My methods are informed by my creative writing practice as I work with storytelling as method. I also draw from indigenous oral traditions and indigenous Shona frameworks of the power of story to develop my method.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".