Imagining Gay Life in Africa: Contributions and Challenges of African Cinema

In this presentation, I turn to three African queer-affirming films – Inxeba (John Trengove 2017), Walking with Shadows (Aoife O’Kelly 2019), and The Blue Caftan (Maryam Touzani 2022) – to investigate how they imagine gay life and love in Africa (specifically, in South Africa, Nigeria and Morocco), and what role religion plays in these visions. Drawing especially on African film studies, African queer theories and theologies, I argue that with their stories, the films challenge both African and western social and theoretical discourses on gay identities and relationships in several significant ways, contributing thus both to a new imagination of gay individuals as a part of African societies, and to the development of theories of sexual and gender identities that attend to the particularities of the African context.