This panel delves into the intricate interplay between queer existence and religion, examining intersections of identity, influence, and resistance within diverse cultural contexts. The panel discussion will be preceded by the screening of short clips from three queer-affirming African movies or a full movie from one of the options: "Inxeba" (John Trengove, South Africa, 2017), "Walking with Shadows" (Aoife O’Kelly, Nigeria, 2019), and "The Blue Caftan" (Maryam Touzani, Morocco, 2022). These clips will prepare the audience for a paper by Stefanie Knauss on the recent development of positive representations of queerness in African cinema, with particular attention to resistance both to anti-queer Christian and Islamic discourses as well as some of the assumptions implicit in Western models of queerness and sexuality. Questions and discussion to follow.
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.