Amar Wahab. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 63, Issue 5. 2016.
Introduction
In October 2009, a member of Parliament with the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), David Bahati, introduced the draft Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) for consideration and debate in the Ugandan Parliament. The introduction of the AHB also took place against the backdrop of the 2005 amendment to the Ugandan Constitution, which sought to prohibit same-sex marriages—a move to preempt such demands by sexual minorities in Uganda that would mirror a Western trajectory of legal rights advocacy—what Weiss (2013, p. 149) observed as a growing pattern of homophobic “anticipatory countermobilization” by non-Western nation-states (and this is not only specific to contests around sexuality). According to Strand (2011, p. 917), “despite the fact that the Ugandan Penal Code already criminalizes consensual sex between individuals of the same sex,” the AHB sought “to strengthen these laws” (Strand, 2012, p. 565). While the AHB builds on colonial legislation aimed at regulating “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” it prioritizes the de jure criminalization of homosexuality—serving to de facto destigmatize other sexual practices criminalized within the penal code—and elaborates a wider catchment of criminality around homosexuality. This includes the new juridico-discursive category of “aggravated homosexuality,” the criminalization of promotion of homosexuality, a “failure to disclose the offence” clause, and the “nullification of inconsistent international treaties, protocols, declarations and conventions” advocating human rights based on sexual orientation. The Bill was passed in Uganda’s Parliament in December 2013, and the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) was given assent in February 2014 by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
According to Sadgrove, Vanderbeck, Andersson, Valentine, and Ward (2012, p. 109) the anti-homosexuality legislation represents an attempt by Ugandan political (and religious) leaders to monopolize “public discursive space” and naturalize a preemptive rhetoric of national security: “Homosexuality is un-African” (this is not to suggest that all African nation-states mobilize around same-sex sexualities in a single way). Despite this attempt to regulate the terms of public political life, debates around the Bill spiraled within Uganda between 2009 and 2014. The Ugandan-based Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CSC)—a coalition of 28 social justice organizations (including the LGBTI collective, Sexual Minorities Uganda [SMUG]) advocating against the AHB, in conjunction with international (gay) human rights organizations. The CSC claimed that the Bill is a threat to public health (especially regarding universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment), a threat to international human rights, and a threat to all Ugandans as it contradicts the Ugandan Constitution (Strand, 2011, p. 922). The Coalition also released a guideline statement for its “national, regional and international partners” (CSC, 2014) after the AHB was assented to, which included organizing “worldwide demonstrations” among a list of 20 different advocacy strategies.
In August 2012—amid the Bill debates—the first Pride parade and rally was organized in Uganda, which was subsequently stormed by the police. SMUG researcher Richard Lusimbo claimed: “at that moment (the Pride parade) I felt liberated, because for the very first time, I was marching and shouting that it’s time for our rights; it’s time we are set free,” (Valelly, 2012). In 2013 SMUG (comprising 18 organizations specifically focused on LGBT issues, including Freedom and Roam Uganda [FARUG]) sued the Minister of Ethics and Integrity for shutting down a workshop organized by FARUG that aimed to bring together “activists from all over eastern Africa” (Jordan, 2013). In 2012 Sexual Minorities Uganda (in conjunction with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights) also sued Pastor Scott Lively (one of the primary U.S.-based anti-gay evangelists in Uganda), linking his anti-gay evangelism to crimes against humanity (Barry, 2013). A group of public health clinicians, researchers, and academics in Uganda (along with international experts and organizations) also sent an open letter to President Museveni denouncing the scientific claims in the Bill, highlighting its potential to undermine public health and human rights (see Kaleeba et al., 2014). In a statement issued by “the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community” in Uganda, activists claimed that “The grounds on which we have always contested this bill are that it is blatantly unconstitutional, is against international human rights standards, is redundant for the most part, and would wreak havoc on the fight against HIV/AIDS and other public health priorities in Uganda” (2013). Anti-Bill activism on the part of Ugandan organizations such as SMUG and CSC has also proliferated through social media—through press statements, petitions, and articles critiquing the Bill—especially in reaction to what Strand (2011, p. 928) has identified as media-sponsored homophobia by Uganda’s mainstream media.
Commonly referred to as the “Kill the Gays” or “Bahati” Bill, the proposed legislation also prompted international reaction and outrage, especially on the part of international gay human rights advocates and organizations (e.g., International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association [ILGA], Human Rights Watch, and International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]), as well as criticism from Western governments (especially the US, UK, and Western Europe), arguing that the superlatively homophobic Bill contravened the basic human rights of LGBT Ugandans (i.e., a reactive “Kill the Bill” discourse). Anti-AHB debates were therefore informed and structured by a transnational assemblage of contestation and activism by human rights organizations (nationally and internationally)—advocating “gay rights as human rights”—attempting to intervene into Ugandan politics and ultimately hoping to halt the passing of the Bill. There has also been a parallel escalation of anti-homophobia/anti-Bill civil protest within Western nation-states—for example, the Paris “die-in” in 2012 whereby Ugandan refugees protested the AHB, “echoing the language of Freedom House, a Washington-based watch-dog group” that the AHB further infringes on the fundamental human rights of LGBT Ugandans (Pan Africa ILGA, 2012). In 2009—the year when the AHB was tabled in the Ugandan Parliament—Ugandan trans rights activist Victor Juliet Mukasa, former chair of SMUG, was spotlighted as the International Grand Marshall leading Toronto’s Pride Parade (under the banner of “global human rights for queers”; Murray, 2009, p. 4). In the UK, the BBC’s documentary (Alcock, 2011) explicitly spotlighted Uganda as The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay (a refetishization of Time magazine’s spotlighting of Jamaica as “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth” [Padgett, 2006]), and the BBC’s panel discussion Is Homosexuality Un-African? (2011) emerged from and fueled the international human rights hysteria around Uganda’s AHB. In December 2013 British gay rights and LGBTI supporters—a joint initiative of the African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group and the infamous Peter Tatchell Foundation—protested outside the Ugandan High Commission in London on the eve of the legislation’s assent (see Tatchell, 2014). In the United States, the assent was met with protest posters hung on the fence of the Ugandan Embassy in Washington, one being an “eviction notice” signed by “1AngryOldLesbian.org” (Capehart, 2014). The anonymous group behind the silent protest claimed to have a collaborative relationship with the global LGBTI Ugandan collective, Kuchu3 Diaspora Alliance (mobilized through Facebook). In addition, the emergence of new global social movements against the AHB/AHA—organized, in part, through social media—have resulted in “Kill the Bill” campaigns, including All Out’s (2013) (funded in part by the Ford Foundation) 350,000-target signature petition to stop the AHB’s assent, pressure foreign government intervention, and urge corporations to speak out against the legislation. Similarly, a 500,000-plus-signature petition on Change.org (2014) urged multinational financial corporations, such as Citibank and Barclays, operating in Uganda—some with stellar ratings on the Human Rights Campaigns Corporate Equality Index—to take a stand against the AHB.
In addition to the spiraling coalition between sexual rights advocacy groups in Uganda, international organizations, and mainstream (as well as diasporic) LGBT organizations in the global North, Western governments (even conservative-led ones such as Canada) joined the international gay human rights lobby against the Ugandan legislation. Hasselriis (2010) has remarked on this seemingly paradoxical development in the Canadian context: “Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose party refused to support same-sex marriage in Canada, is being hailed as a gay rights hero—in Uganda.” Maynard (2012) has questioned this move as an occasion of Canadian pinkwashing (i.e., projecting an image of Canada as “gay-friendly”) that conflicts with the Canadian government’s more conservative moves to “reopen the abortion debate,” “cut refugee healthcare,” and pass anti-immigrant legislation. Kaoma (2013, p. 75) pointed out that following the reintroduction of the “Kill the Gays” Bill in Uganda’s Ninth Parliament in 2012, “the bill received new life after Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird challenged Ugandan Parliament Speaker Rebecca Kadaga at the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Quebec about her country’s record on gays. Upon her return to Uganda, Kadaga promised to pass the bill as a “Christmas” present to Ugandans.” Other Western governments have also taken more hardline disciplinary actions against Uganda. In 2011 British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to cut aid to “governments that do not reform legislation banning homosexuality” (BBC, 2011), and countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway announced aid cuts/rerouting within a month after the Bill’s assent. Perhaps the most stage-setting Western government intervention in the Ugandan and wider African context was U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “gay rights as human rights” speech to the UN in Geneva (2011). The speech served to galvanize U.S. official foreign policy discourse on “gay rights as human rights” by rejecting homosexuality as a Western invention and rejecting culturalist explanations of homophobic violence (among other points)—anchoring universalist conceptions of both homosexuality and homophobia. Clinton’s speech helped to platform the Obama Administration’s Memorandum to the heads of U.S. executive departments and agencies (e.g., Departments of State and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation) “directing all agencies abroad to ensure that U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons” (Obama, 2011). This effectively reset the pulse of human rights discourse within foreign relations policy—tying “gay rights” to assessments of aid, refugee protection, multilateral NGOs, and so on—across the global North.
Situating the Discussion
While these happenings and political moves represent only a fraction of the pro- and antigay advocacy around the AHB/AHA in the transnational context, they demonstrate the emerging incitement to discourse that has produced Uganda as a global flashpoint. This incitement concerns a growing contest between what Puar (2013b) has termed the “pinkwashing” of international human rights discourse (as a feature of an increasingly globalized homonationalism) and what Weiss (2013) referred to as homophobic “anticipatory countermobilization” as the mirror response to the imperialist underpinnings of homonationalism or “gay imperialism” (Haritaworn, Tauqir, & Erdem, 2008). Puar’s (2007) concept of homonationalism points to the pattern of gay and lesbian assimilation into (U.S.) national-normative and neoliberal projects through rhetorics of inclusion, recognition, and rights-based equality. She also has contended that the production of gay and lesbian sexual citizenship depends on the movement’s support for “curtailing of welfare provisions, immigrant rights and the expansion of state power to engage in surveillance, detention and deportation” (2013a, p. 25). Implied in Puar’s conceptualization is the concomitant depoliticization of “gay rights” at the very moment of inclusion facilitated through these rights. In Terrorist Assemblages Puar (2007) focused on the generative effects of U.S. homonationalism in both the national and international contexts, particularly the ways in which gays and lesbians in the United States have self-integrated into and become supporting patriots of the U.S. “War on Terror.” Homonationalism is therefore a concept and a process that requires transnational discursive circuits to ground its efficacy in the U.S. national context. At the same time, these transnational circuits have also facilitated the globalization of this U.S.-centric model of sexual freedom and exceptionalism across Western (allied) territories and are increasingly directed toward the global South—constructed as “exceptionally homophobic.” In the present context, in which Puar (2013b) has suggested that “homonationalism has gone global”—especially through a Euro-American reframing of international human rights discourse to include “gay rights”—Puar (2013b, p. 32) observed the emergence of “pinkwashing” as “the practice of covering over or distracting from a nation’s policies of discrimination of some populations through a noisy touting of its gay rights for a limited few.” As such, critiques of homonationalism as a global phenomenon—or what Bachetta and Haritaworn (2011) termed “homotransnationalism”—shift the gaze from the “homophobic global South” to questioning how the global “gay rights as human rights” discourse “functions as a form of discursive pre-emptive securitization,” within the now “gay-friendly” allied West (Puar, 2013a, p. 33). The pinkwashing of Western (and allied) nation-states is facilitated by the emergence of what Massad (2002) termed “the gay international”—a predominantly White, gay, male Western missionary enterprise premised on a Western definition of and historical trajectory of sexual freedom that aims to save nonnormative sexual others in the global South in the name of such freedom. In the global flashpointing of the Ugandan AHB/AHA, and especially through the “gay human rights advocacy” described above, we observe the ways in which “the gay international” has now coalesced more seamlessly with Western nation-states, branding the West as exceptionally tolerant through its capability to include sexual others into a neoliberal rights-based conception of humanity.
Countering this mobilization, the AHB/AHA (and its burgeoning antigay platform) emerges, in part, as a resistive strategy that has been framed, in part, as an anti-imperial move to secure the sovereignty of the Ugandan nation-state. For Weiss (2013, p. 149), although social movement literature conceptualizes a sequence between (pro-gay) mobilization and (anti-gay) countermobilization, “transnational discursive flows in particular may help to shift the sequence, yielding a form of anticipatory countermobilization” against “gay rights.” As such, might we consider the ramping up of this countermobilization between 2009 and 2014—from the tabling of the AHB to the official assent of the AHA—as a direct response to the ramping up of the homotransnationalist mobilization of “gay human rights” discourse directly targeting the Ugandan legislation? In other words, has “the gay international,” in conjunction with Western governments, served to organize and “stick” (following Ahmed, 2011) homophobia (as a Western analytic) onto the Ugandan nation-state as a perpetrator of “organized (public) homophobia” (Weiss, 2013, p. 154)—hailing the Ugandan nation-state into the homotransnationalist disciplinary gaze? In turn, has the response of the Ugandan state (supported by its own transnational networks)—now an organized and constituted entity of “political homophobia” (Weiss, 2013, p. 150)—also fortuitously strengthened the efficacy of Western claims about sexual exceptionalism? These questions prompt further discussion of the ways in which “homophobic Uganda” (and AHB/AHA debates) have been constituted within a transnational circuit of “call and response” (Puar, 2013a), whereby both pro- and anti-AHB/AHA agents hail and incite each other into discourse—that is, they prescribe the limits of intelligibility for each other.
Although I am not directly concerned with the sequencing of this circuit, this article aims to map out the discursive terrain of this impasse between pro- and antigay mobilization around the AHB/AHA that cannot be assessed outside of this circuit of “call and response.” What follows is a review and analysis of some of the scholarly discussions that have emerged to map this terrain of (counter) mobilization as a contested transnational phenomenon. I first offer a summary of the dominant discourse that accounts for the rise of anticipatory political homophobia in Uganda—that is, the increasing influence of (U.S.) transnational evangelism that has precipitated a state-religious complex of “homophobia,” which has significant implications in the U.S. national cultural-political context. If transnational evangelism in Uganda generates the “homophobic” call that invokes the anti-AHA/AHB response from “the gay international” and Western governments, the next section of this article aims to critique this Western homotransnationalist response by analyzing its limited terms of operation, focusing on the ways in which it reiterates a call (to the global South) into the biopolitical project of Western modernity (one that further consolidates the discourse of “Ugandan homophobia”). At the same time, I suggest in the next section that this transnational discursive circuit has filtered out the complexities around postcolonialism in Uganda, and especially how nonnormative sexualities and the AHB/AHA structure or respond to these complexities. In lieu of a conclusion, I open up this moment of the copresence between homotransnationalist mobilization and “homophobic anticipatory countermobilization” as (re)organizing/suturing a global ordering project that is deeply invested in biopolitics and necropolitics. I suggest that the global flashpointing of Uganda in the context of the AHB/AHA incites further questions concerning the transnationality of neoliberal imperialism in queer times.
Transnational Evangelism and the Rise of Anticipatory Political Homophobia in Uganda
According to Kaoma (2013, p. 76), “U.S. religious conservatives’ ideologies and activism are behind the growing violent homophobia in Christian Africa” (which some scholars view as paradoxical given the U.S. Christian Right’s historical support of anti-liberation initiatives in Africa). Kaoma views this paradoxical alliance as related to the consolidation of the “culture wars” within the United States, between a conservative and powerful Christian Right—led primarily by U.S. evangelicals (with a firm foothold in conservative Republican politics)—and the liberal democratic “gay-friendly” Obama regime, which has facilitated the officialization of homonationalism (despite the regime’s apathy around Proposition 8 in California and Arizona’s antigay legislation). Like Kaoma, Baptiste (2014) claimed that “as the gay rights movement has gained traction in the United States, the more virulently homophobic ideologies of the religious right have been pushed further out of the mainstream and into fringe territory,” that is, into the peripheralized global South. The globalization of the U.S. “culture wars” in Uganda is therefore connected to the outsourcing of allegiance and constituency-building by anti- and pro-gay advocacy (see Kaoma, 2013; Oliver, 2013), reflecting the power of U.S. politics to corral nation-states in the global South as “proxies” (Bosia, 2013; Weiss, 2013) in this symbolic and ideological struggle between evangelical homophobia and state-sanctioned homonationalism. This is not to suggest that religiously motivated anti-same-sex discourse is a recent phenomenon, since it was installed as a form of colonial discipline during British rule in Uganda (see Hoad, 2007).
Many scholars have also questioned why antigay rhetoric, fueled by U.S. Christian intervention in Africa, has gained such traction and appeal to African nation-states in this particular moment. Popular explanations of the timing of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill suggest that it emerged as a result of a “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda” (2009)—organized by the Ugandan-based Family Life Network, featuring key U.S.-based evangelists such as Scott Lively of Defend the Family. Kaoma (2013) suggested that the “Seminar” and a “strategic meeting on Combating Homosexuality in Uganda” (also organized by the Family Life Network in 2009) were catalysts of “antigay sentiment” already set in motion during the decade of the 1990s—the 1998 Lambeth Conference in particular, with its contentious and divisive resolution on homosexuality (see Hoad, 2007). The escalation of transnational antigay activism in Uganda through antigay protests in Kampala, Pastor Martin Ssempa’s (the key Ugandan evangelical figure) showing of gay pornography to his congregation (which went viral on YouTube), and the public interrogation of trans activist Pepe Julian Onziema on national television have all helped to solidify the alliance between the U.S. evangelical elite and Ugandan political and religious leaders. In fact, this alliance has strengthened through social media, as reported in the GayStarNews (Littauer, 2013a): “Matt Barber, attorney for Liberty Counsel, a US right wing Christian law firm, listed as an anti-gay group, has been praising anti-gay Ugandan evangelical pastor, Martin Ssempa on Twitter.” The article further links this evangelical alliance to the Ugandan government, claiming that “Ssempa and the US Evangelical pastor Scott Lively have also been implicated in working closely together with Ugandan Minister of Parliament (MP) David Bahati in drafting and pushing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality “Kill the Gays” Bill” (Littauer, 2013a; see Kaoma (2013) for further details on this relationship).
Oliver (2013, p. 100) further demonstrated that antigay rhetoric within Uganda has gained traction especially since it is “formulated with reference to culturally-specific discourses and concerns over ‘African’ culture and tradition, neocolonial influence and power, and struggles over national sovereignty and identity.” She offered four explanations why the U.S.-led Christian Right has turned its attention to Africa at this moment, spreading its pro-family and antigay agenda: (1) the perceived attack and erosion of the “traditional” family by global feminist discourse; (2) the fracturing of the Episcopal Church within the United States as a result of gay rights (orthodox vs. liberal constituents) that has marked a turn to Africa (especially the Church of Uganda) to stabilize the Anglican Communion orthodoxy; (3) the unparalleled degree of political power wielded by Christian conservatives during the Bush administration (especially in foreign relations policies pertaining to abortion, abstinence, HIV/AIDS, etc.); and (4) the Christian Right’s attempt to manufacture racial reconciliation between Blacks and Whites in the United States at the expense of LGBT communities. Oliver’s findings suggest a wider set of local and global currents structuring the traction and appeal of antigay rhetoric within African nation-states (with highly crucial ramifications in the U.S. context).
As such, it is important to think about these transnational evangelical-political alliances as related to and propelling dynamics within the U.S. context, which divert attention away from explaining homophobia as an intrinsically Ugandan problem. For instance, the emergence of homonationalism as a secular ideal within the U.S. context has created and hardened frictions and divisions within the Christian Right—that is, factions supporting versus those in opposition to gay rights. This battle has structured the appeal of Uganda to more conservative elements in the U.S. Christian Right given that the Ugandan Church severed ties with (and refused funding from) the U.S. Episcopal Church, which endorsed one of its bishops living in a gay relationship (Hoad, 2007, p. 55). Sadgrove et al. (2012) have also suggested that the “upsurge” in media sensationalism around homosexuality between 2008 and 2010 was also “catalyzed” by this separation, leading the Church of Uganda to boycott the 2008 Lambeth Conference. This rift no doubt influenced the All-Africa Bishops’ Conference in Entebbe, Uganda (2010), where there was a concerted push to criminalize homosexuality (see Kaoma, 2013, p. 81). At the same time, the AHB (symbolic of the relationship between state and religion) has also facilitated solidaristic possibilities across religious differences within Uganda, as Strand (2012) states: “In 2009, Muslim Tabliqs teamed up with the Pentecostal churches and joined the interreligious coalition, the National Coalition Against Homosexuality and Sexual Abuses in Uganda, whose main purpose is to eliminate homosexuality in Uganda” (p. 568). One might argue that the transnational evangelism that has taken root in Uganda to frame and bolster the “homosexuality is un-African” discourse that has also provided the Ugandan state (and its associated elites) with an opportunity to rework the terms and conditions of its postcolonial sovereignty—a project that is deeply structured by considerations of race, as it is by gender and sexuality. In this regard, Hoad (2007, pp. 56-57) read the “homosexuality is un-African” discourse as
a reaction formation in the psychoanalytic sense against certain colonial sexual and racial formations”—promulgated through Victorian and scientific colonial discourses that metonymized “Africa” with primitiveness. “In this context” he states “anti-Western attacks on “homosexuality” can be seen as responses to these prior attributions of primitiveness, and as reversals of the racist charge of retardation and/or degeneration” while imperial “civilized” sexual norms can remain in place and can paradoxically be defended as authentically African.
The pronouncement “Homosexuality is un-African,” therefore, not only serves to license the U.S. Christian Right’s open access to Uganda (as an outsourced constituency) but also symbolizes a complex convergence of transnational evangelical and state (antigay) protectionism—suggesting that Ugandan constituents also have a stake (albeit a differently inflected one) in this pronouncement and are thus not mere dupes of a transnational evangelical conspiracy.
Although much of the scholarship on the Ugandan case has focused on the timing and power of transnational evangelical activism to support and consolidate state-sponsored and culturally/religiously sanctioned homophobia, there is also growing scrutiny of the transnational LGBT human rights advocacy, especially in light of Massad’s (2002) critiques of “the gay international.” In fact, Kaoma (2013, p. 79) claimed that both African religious and political leaders (supporting the AHB) and African LGBT persons “have international allies … the very groups involved in fighting American culture wars.” He continued, “while progressive American human-rights groups side with LGBT persons and insist that sexual rights are fundamental human rights, U.S. social-conservative groups side with African religious and political groups in advocating the permanent criminalization of sexual minorities as both a religious and political duty” (2013, p. 79). In the context of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, Hoad (2007, pp. 61-62) similarly suggested that
the universalization of the homosexual as a transhistorical, trans-spatial subject, as it is articulated in human rights discourse and used by advocates within the Anglican Church at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, reproduces certain axiomatics of imperialism. Like their missionary forbears, international gay rights activists and the predominantly Anglo-American pro-gay bishops assert that their sexual norms are the only valid ones, that their specific cultural organizations of corporeal intimacies need universal protection, in this instance that sexual orientation is a common property and right of humanity. Paradoxically, the antihomosexual African bishops partake in the same legacy, by asserting another proselytizing universal form.
Sadgrove et al. (2012, p. 108) have also observed that the “struggles between human rights [espousing the transcendence of Western conceptions of sexual freedom] and ‘culturalist’ perspectives [espousing the distinctiveness of ‘indigenous’ non-Western sexualities]” has stabilized a polarization between an international gay rights agenda and an antigay agenda “as both sides reinvent themselves to pursue political ends which rest on reductive perceptions of the other.” For instance, while antigay discourse has focused on the “un-Africanness” of homosexuality, Richard Lusimbo (a researcher with SMUG) has insisted that “it is imported homophobia from US evangelicals which is unAfrican, not homosexuality” (Littauer, 2013b). As such, while state/cultural/religious homophobia and international/local Ugandan gay rights activists are pitted in opposition to each other, they are both implicated in a struggle to produce and authenticate their claims through transnational circuits of influence. It is no surprise therefore, that both pro- and antigay activism have accused each other of being agents of Western (especially U.S.) imperialism. In other words, both discursive formations have coproduced the case of Uganda within a project of global flashpointing—one that depends on stabilizing the question “Is homosexuality/ homophobia un-African?” as the only question that makes the case intelligible on the global radar. In this regard, the pro- and antigay rhetoric that has emerged as a transnational phenomenon around the Ugandan AHB/AHA is but the most recent installment of “the scramble for Africa” (Pakenham, 1991), now reset within the context of an emerging Western homo-neoliberal modernity.
Homo/Trans/Nationalism and the Trafficking of “Gay Rights as Human Rights”
In attempting to trouble the central framing dyad of whether “homosexuality/homophobia is un-African,” the concepts of “homo(trans)nationalism” and “gay imperialism” (see Bacchetta & Haritaworn, 2011; Massad, 2002; and Puar, 2007, 2013a) are crucial to understanding the epistemological framework that provides this question set with its discursive viability. According to Sadgrove et al. (2012, p. 107), the application of this question in the case of Uganda needs critical assessment in light of the “well-rehearsed concerns about the transmissibility of human rights discourses, and the conceptual, social, economic and political worlds into which they must be translated.” While Massad (2002) has provoked a rethinking of the universal applicability of the term homosexuality (and heterosexuality), other scholars have likewise questioned the analytic of homophobia (see Adam, 1998; Murray, 2009) or what Puar, 2013b, p. 37) identified as “a flat invocation of ‘homophobia’ as an automatic, unifying, experiential frame.” As such, it is crucial to distinguish the discourse of homophobia—as a “political and modular force” (Bosia & Weiss, 2013, p. 5) that underlies the missionary gaze of homotransnationalist human rights interventions—from discourses about anti-same-sex relationality and sociality. Thoreson, for example, has suggested the term “anti-queer animus”—as a way of “destabilizing ‘homophobia’ as an analytic term” (2014, p. 25). The terms homosexuality and homophobia that have been incessantly trafficked across the transnational terrain around the Ugandan case are therefore both power/knowledge formations grounded in a Western epistemological framework—one that recent critiques of homonationalism suggest reflects situated rather than universal ways of making sense of sexuality and nonnormative sexualities.
As a discursive blueprint that stabilizes particular constructs and categories regarding sexuality, the Western discourse of sexual rights—as advocated in the Ugandan context—is premised on the indispensability of the heterosexual/homosexual binary for organizing bodies and relations (itself derived from a Western sex/gender/sexuality logic).6 This presumes an essential and universal homosexual identity, without critical scrutiny of the ways in which these identity categories are instrumentalized by neoliberal governmentality. Inherent in this dominant discourse is a demand for visibility in the public sphere (as a proxy to what counts as properly political), resulting in a limited version of (sexual) freedom and citizenship through a discourse of political rights (grounded in the fetishized rhetoric of “inclusion”). This framework not only guides and fixes the knowledge of same-sex sexuality as homosexuality per se but also constitutes what, in the Western imagination, stands in as the dominant analytic of anti-same-sex sentiment—that is, homophobia. From this perspective, homonationalist discourse depends on the traffic of both concepts of homosexuality and homophobia (and minimal traffic of sexuality-specific Ugandan terms such as kuchu and mudoko dako, as well as discussions of “Ubuntu” sociality) interpellating nations in the global South into a Western civilizational discourse of sexual rights. In fact, Puar and Mikdashi, in conversation (2012), suggested that homonationalism has become an instrument of neoliberal transnational governmentality in which all states and subjects are interpellated into global intelligibility and usefulness through the emergence of “sexual modernity” as a civilizational parameter (Puar, 2013b, p. 337). In the context in which (Western) homonationalism “has gone global,” Puar conceptualized this analytic “to apprehend state formation and a structure of modernity: as an assemblage of geopolitical and historical forces, neoliberal interests in capitalist accumulation both cultural and material, biopolitical state practices of population control, and affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights” (2013b, p. 337). As such, homonationalism is not merely a form of White, gay racism, but an “analytic category” that “can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it,” (Puar, 2013b, p. 337). Puar’s conceptual clarification of homonationalism suggests that both pro- and antigay discourse mediate and are mediated by this neoliberal structuring.
As Hoad (2007) has suggested, this structuring is deeply mediated by constructs of race, coded within the pro- and antigay debates in Uganda as matters of immutable and at times irreconcilable cultural difference. We see this at work through the ways in which notions of culture—more so, cultural difference—have been mobilized, circulated, and managed by both pro- and antigay constituents to anchor the discursive complex—“homosexuality/homophobia is un-African”—in this moment of neoliberal modernity. Hoad (2007, p. 51) has remarked on the shift from earlier “hysterias” around gender to sexuality as the new proxy of producing and marking cultural difference (for example, in the 1998 Lambeth Conference) that then “functions as a site … for the emergence of cross-culturally recognizable sexual norms.” Both pro- and antigay discourses have made claims about sexuality and culture as a way of fixing African difference, against which the West’s “ideological difference” appears cultureless and thus universal (see Oliver, 2013, p. 98). Yet the universalist claims of “the gay international” are deeply entwined with and structured by race that serves to racialize homophobia, while making invisible Whiteness the norm invoked in the discourse of “gay human rights.” For example, while Clinton’s UN speech claims the universality of gay human rights by rejecting culturalist explanations of homophobic violence, Agathangelou (2013, p. 470) viewed this move as a neoliberal production that depends on racialized deployments, arguing that “the non-existence of Blackness (understood as inert matter) is precisely what makes the rest of the world legible; the non-radicalness of Africans (‘proved’ by ‘gay rights’ failures or some other way) is the foil against which ‘the West’ and Whites measure their legitimacy and value.”
The racialization of “Ugandan homophobia” is even more noticeable when one looks at the highly uneven activism by “the gay international” across the globe—suggesting the incongruity between “gay human rights” as a universal concept and the asymmetrical assessment of homophobia across a racialized geopolitical field. Coly (2013, pp. 21-22) has observed that “the international attention paid to the Ukrainian and Russian [antigay propaganda] bills is at best tepid, especially when compared with Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill” which has instead generated a hyperbolic reaction, especially in the US and UK, that has rendered “the hypervisibility of homophobias in Africa as “African” homophobia” (2013, pp. 21-22). Coly remarked that the Ukrainian and Russian cases are discursively policed to avert the placeholder of “homophobic Europe”—pointing to the racialized ranking of homophobias in the global context under the banner of culture. This mainstream framing of “Africa as homophobe”—one that reactivates colonial Africanist discourses of alterity—therefore stands in direct contrast to the ways in which homophobia in the global North is differently qualified as emerging instead out of individual pathology or marginal groups (e.g., religious fundamentalist) and nations (e.g., states aligned with the Cold War) that threaten the prevailing neoliberal logic of Western nation-states. Coly viewed this racialized formation as one that “fixes the predetermined notion of homophobia as African homophobia … [and one which] has its raison d’être in Western “homonationalism,” a narrative of sexual exceptionalism championed by LGBTIs from the global North and consonant with the neo-imperial politics of their nation-states” (2013, p. 22).
At the same time, culturalist claims have also been mobilized by Ugandan antigay political and religious constituents espousing, within the “homosexuality is un-African” discourse, the unnaturalness and ahistoricity of same-sex intimacy and sociality within an essential, pure, and timeless “African” culture. Oliver (2013, p. 98) claimed that “denouncing homosexuality as “un-African” not only represents an explicit rejection of “new” universal sexual norms and continued neocolonial influences but also seeks to construct a postcolonial national identity that is based on a fictive and essentialist understanding of “African culture.” This has led many scholars to respond with the counterclaim that “homosexuality is African” through investigations of homosexuality in pre- and postcolonial Africa (see Hoad, 2007; Murray & Roscoe, 2001), which also posit homophobia as a Western colonial invention. In fact, Tamale (2013, p. 34) pointed out that “the global reaction to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill … demonstrated both a selective amnesia about the origins and operation of homophobic legal codes and persecutions on one hand, and imperialist impositions of moral sexual values on the other.” As such, the denialism around the historicity of nonnormative sexualities in Uganda functions as an inventive exercise that requires national forgetting in the name of a purely heterosexual past. Moreover, scholars studying nonnormative sexualities in the context of Uganda (see Tamale, 2013) and other African states (see Epprecht, 2005; Murray & Roscoe, 2001) have illuminated various modes of permissibility of same-sex relations that might not be publicly visible (based on Western understandings of visibility) but that are publicly recognized and acknowledged in different ways that render them intelligible as customary forms of sociality. This has led Thoreson (2014, p. 25) to articulate that “African homosexualities and the meanings of same-sex activity, relationships and identity are not reducible to the frameworks that dominate Euro-American sexual politics.”
However, especially in postcolonial contexts, such as Uganda, which represent a complex commingling of Western and non-Western epistemologies, we cannot simplistically allege that discourses of categorical “homophobia” are distinct from anti-same-sex sentiment, especially given the overlapping implications of colonial legacies and neoliberal transnationalism. In this vein, Coly (2013, p. 23) suggested that the discourse of “homophobic Africa is in fact a Euro-American-African co-production”—one that proliferates and further complicates what Boellerstorf (2008) has termed “queer trajectories of the postcolonial.” As such, discourses of “homosexuality/homophobia” and “(anti-)same-sex relationality” cannot be unproblematically deployed, prioritized, or dispensed with to make sense of Uganda (or the AHB/AHA), especially given the transnational context in which this case has been visibilized and made intelligible as such. In his comparative analysis of anti-same-sex sentiment in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, Hoad (1999, 2007) has suggested a discursive-political space for rendering anti-same-sex sentiment in postcolonial contexts differently intelligible—as contingent—and thus articulated through the language of “not-simple-homophobia” (Hoad, 2007). Somewhat similarly, Thoreson (2014) spoke to the contingency of “anti-queer animus” through his critique of homophobia as an analytic term, stating that the latter
elides forms of anti-queer animus which are not about homosexuality per se, but may also be about gender, class, power and other forms of difference and belonging … the term does not adequately capture hostility that is linked to familial or social responsibilities, the preservation of customary or traditional laws and practices in the face of a seemingly inaccessible state, or the reassertion of national virility and sovereignty vis-à-vis the North. (p. 25)
As such, the “homophobia” invoked by “the gay international” (including “gay-friendly” Western governments) is categorical in the sense that it responds directly to homosexual identity through a framework of discrimination and inclusion.
Interestingly, Mikdashi (2011) claimed that “the experience of homophobia as the primary discrimination one faces in life is usually the mark of an otherwise privileged existence. For the majority of people in the world, oppression, to paraphrase Edward Said on culture, is contrapuntal. It moves, is multidirectional, it is adaptive, and it forms a terrain of interconnected injustices.” Also, for Long (2009), the prioritization of homophobia as the primary injury addressed by international gay human rights advocates edits out the more complex global structuring of oppression, thereby determining the “limits of caring”—in this case caring for Ugandans on the condition that they are LGBT-representable. While these critiques counter the grip of homophobia as the default analytic, they also represent a vigilant “watching out” (Spivak, 1999, p. 110) against the seductiveness of Western epistemological frames and a critical scrutiny of their returns on investment in the global North. In other words, transnational gay human rights advocacy may not only elide the intricate complexities of postcolonial nation-states such as Uganda but, through these elisions, also securitize hegemonic polities in the global North as entities that are immune to vulnerability, panic, and radical ideological rearticulation.
Despite these epistemological quandaries, international gay human rights reaction to the AHB has facilitated a simplistic global visibilization of Uganda as “homophobic” and thus anti-human rights—a sort of ceremonial of gay human rights disciplinary and interventionist arrangements framed through the increasingly militarized model of global development. For example, Clinton’s UN speech—which “emphasized [that] … ‘gay rights’ is a foreign concept in parts of Africa and Asia and is a problem in world politics” (Agathangelou, 2013, p. 454)—depends on the mobilization of homonationalist discourse that posits “the idea that LGBTQs the world over experience, practice and are motivated by the same desires, and that their politics are grounded in an understanding that ties (1) the directionality of their love and desire to a stable identity and (2) that stable identity into the grounds from which one speaks and makes political claims,” (Mikdashi, 2011). Mikdashi (2011) therefore suggested that the “gay rights” invoked in Clinton’s speech is anchored within a particular Western historical trajectory of identity politics that masks the complex struggles for social and political justice of those in the global South. Furthermore, Mikdashi (2011) also purported that the neoliberal category of “gay rights” “can travel internationally not only as a vehicle for normative homo-nationalism, but as a vehicle for neoliberal ways of producing politics and subjects more broadly.” It is no surprise that the international gay human rights response to the “Kill the Gays” Bill (read by the international community as categorical and legal homophobia) has been “Kill the Bill” (i.e., anti-homophobia as the only legitimate response), which reifies the very same “universalist, identitarian epistemology” (Traub, 2008, p. 5) that conditions the terms of the debate. Furthermore, it is precisely because this discourse of “homosexuality/homophobia” or pro-gay versus antigay (that can, at times, shift critical scrutiny away from heteronormativity) has become the dominant framework for calling subjects into relations of intelligibility with each other, that the “rational abstraction” of “gay rights as human rights” is presented as an “all-too-seductive move” or a compulsory invitation into neoliberal governmentality that Ugandans “cannot not want” (Spivak, 1999, p. 110, 173) or refuse.
Puar (2013, p. 338) referred to this neoliberal logic around sexual freedom as the “human rights industrial complex,” noting that “the gay and lesbian human rights industry continues to proliferate Euro-American constructs of identity (not to mention the notion of a sexual identity) that privilege identity politics, ‘coming out,’ public visibility, and legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress.” The global panic generated by the Ugandan AHB/AHA has led Dicklitch, Yost, and Dougan (2012) to propose the “building” of a global human rights surveillance mechanism—the “Barometer of Gay Rights”—a global check-box formula for assessing homophobia and rationalizing human rights intervention based on evaluative categories such as de jure and de facto (civil/political) state protection of homosexuals, gay rights advocacy, socioeconomic rights, and societal persecution. These kinds of surveillance instruments, according to Puar, 2013b, p. 336) are aimed at evaluating “the right to and capacity for national sovereignty” of especially non-Western nation states. Not only are these instruments premised on and discursively organized by a Western trajectory of “gay rights” discourse in the global North (i.e., “We will assess your sexual un/freedoms—and thus your place in civilization’s trajectory—based on the extent to which you are unlike us—who have achieved such freedom”), but it presumes and immunizes Western epistemological frameworks as prediscursive and transhistorical. From a Foucauldian perspective, these disciplinary formations create and constitute the very subjects they seek to govern in the name of. The traction of anti-homophobia panic by “the gay international” depends, therefore, on the reconstitution of Ugandan public discourse through a Western LGBT lens—one that renders LGBT Ugandans as representable (global) victim subjects (Shakhsari, 2013) who are thus apprehendable and governable in the global domain. As Amar (2013) has shown, human rights mechanisms depend on the constitution and transformation of their salvageable victims into “serviceable figures” (Puar, 2013b, p. 338) and are thus deeply implicated in the transnational production of human security states both in the global North (e.g., reinforcing ideas about “gay friendliness” through queer refugee prioritization) and the global South (e.g., the support of and dependence on LGBT NGOs to enlighten their seemingly “backward” states). This implies that the work of “the gay international” in Uganda is also about international surveillance in the name of human security.
However, this claim has, in turn, incited contest over the meanings and terms of human rights and security—a contest that is also waged by the antigay constituency through a discourse of national security. We can detect this in the language of security used by the Ugandan state-supported mainstream media: “security operatives infiltrated gay groups … the government says it has intercepted minutes of a recent meeting that discussed wide-ranging strategies on how to promote the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Uganda” (Observer correspondent, 2012). Responding to this discursively produced threat to national security, Reverend Simon Lokodo, Minister of Ethics and Integrity, advocated the “ban [and deregistration] of 38 NGOs deemed sympathetic to activities of LGBT people in the country [23 of which are outed in the newspaper article]” (Observer correspondent, 2012). The singularizing production of Africa as exceptionally homophobic (by “the gay international” in collusion with Western governments)—that grounds Western claims of sexual exceptionalism as the basis of globalizing gay human rights and security—is thus countered by internationally supported antigay political and religious leaders’ disqualification of homosexuality as the basis of human rights—what Cheney (2012) referred to as “human rights exceptionalism” (p. 89). We see this, for example, in the launch of a Ugandan parliamentary handbook on human rights (which deliberately omitted (homo)sexuality as the basis of human rights) by antigay parliamentarian Rebecca Kadaga mere months before the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was assented to (Pan Africa ILGA, 2012). This move is especially interesting in light of the AHB clause (though subsequently removed in the AHA) related to the “nullification of inconsistent international treaties, protocols, declarations and conventions” (framing gay rights as human rights) that would have permitted the Ugandan government to still make claims about its adherence to human rights while promoting the homophobic legislation. The contrasting ways in which claims (and counterclaims) about exceptionalism are rationalized in a dialectical way and toward opposite ends by both “the gay international” and the pro-AHB advocates suggest that perhaps both discourses are constituted within the circuit of “call and response” (see Puar, 2013a) that is structured by homonationalism (echoing Puar’s (2013a) claim that no one is outside of this moment of global neoliberal restructuring).
Widening the Problem-Space: Postcolonial Uganda
The “gay rights as human rights” discourse of “the gay international” has emerged in the Ugandan case through a narrow presumption that “homophobia is always [and only] about homosexuality” (Murray, 2009, p. 3)—a logic that preempts thinking “more contextually, historically, and conceptually about what might be at stake in claims to homosexual rights in different geopolitical spaces” (Walcott, 2009, p. 317). My turn to understanding matters of context in postcolonial Uganda is therefore informed by Murray’s (2009, p. 4) assertion that “homo-hatred” within postcolonial nation-states is a “culturally complex phenomenon that is structured through locally significant categories of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, and/or religion.” I have not come across evidence of anti-AHB/AHA activism that frames a more expansive conception of anti-oppression and social justice nuanced by the wider socioeconomic and political context in postcolonial Uganda—especially since this more complicated picture might implicate the global North in the production of uncertainty and vulnerability that condition the emergence of the AHB/AHA. To deepen an understanding of how state-sponsored “anticipatory homophobia” (the mirror image of homonationalism)—in this case, the AHB/AHA—has gained such traction and value as a discourse of national security (and therefore an opportunity for shoring up state legitimacy), it is important to highlight the socioeconomic and political contexts that condition this historically present moment in Uganda and that are either downplayed by or disconnected from international gay human rights discourse. Furthermore, these matters of context are not only about explaining anti-queer animus in Uganda, but they provoke a questioning about how national vulnerabilities are produced by globalizing Western neoliberal arrangements and how tools such as the AHB/AHA might (symbolically) serve to suture these vulnerabilities and their contingent effects.
Scholars such as Tamale (2013), Coly (2013), Nyong’o (2012), and Oliver (2013) have suggested that political or state-sponsored homophobia is instrumentalized by postcolonial nation-states such as Uganda as a “political resource,” targeting nonconforming sexualities as scapegoats or ruses to deflect and divert national panics and anxieties about other complex socioeconomic issues (i.e., a sort of transfer point for anxieties). In fact, a press statement issued by “the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community” in Uganda referred to the AHB as a “‘smokescreen’ to divert focus away from issues of national and political concern and importance” (2013). According to Sadgrove et al. (2012, p. 105), this is a key consideration that remains invisible in the reductionist analytic of human rights (which prioritizes legal/political over social and economic justice). This is also consistent with Long’s (2009, p. 120) observation that the emergence of international LGBT rights-based activism is coincident with “an increasing turn toward claims rooted in the symbolic order and the cultural field, not in negotiations over tangible goods”—an analytic that prioritizes the politics of recognition over issues of material inequality (see also Leech, 2013). In the Ugandan context, Coly (2013, p. 25) argued that “embattled leaders throughout the continent use the figure of the homosexual as a scapegoat and opportune diversion from the issues of high unemployment, rampant poverty, and bad governance.” Tamale (2013, p. 33) has highlighted similar socioeconomic conditions such as “unprecedented rates of unemployment, below-average wages, high taxes, and extremely high cost of living, and the poor state of health care,” which “translates into an agitated, distressed, and angry population” (see also Sadgrove et al., 2012; Oliver, 2013). At the same time, the criminalization of citizen dissent and protest (see Tamale, 2013) has also narrowed the window of opportunity for viable contestations around socioeconomic issues—making moral panics around homosexuality effective decoys through which to project and “manipulate social anxieties” (Sadgrove et al., 2012, p. 106).
Despite these attempts to discipline public politics, Oliver (2013, p. 100) claimed that the rising public dissent in Uganda suggests that “ordinary Ugandans [are] … more concerned with the deepening inequalities accompanying global neoliberalism and the government’s illiberal (and often militaristic) response to political dissent than with further criminalizing homosexuality.” The Ugandan media (especially the state-owned New Vision newspaper) is heavily implicated in fueling the image of a nation “under moral siege” (Sadgrove et al., 2012, p. 112), instigating panics that are specifically related to gender and sexuality—for example, around pornography, prostitution, HIV rates of infection, young women wearing miniskirts, and homosexuality. In this regard, it is not surprising that Tamale (2013, p. 32) considered the heightening (transnational) evangelization of Ugandan public space as directly related to “issues of governance and political order.” In light of what seems to be an impending dissolution of the Ugandan national body politic (albeit the effect of a globalizing neoliberal governmentality), the AHB emerges as something the people of Uganda “cannot not want” (Spivak, 1999, p. 110). As a symbolic gesture, the AHB performs a ceremonial of state protectionism that secures the Ugandan state’s image of legitimacy, in contrast to the state’s inability to provide a more reassuring picture of national socioeconomic prosperity and political stability (this is not to suggest that socioeconomic stability will inevitably materialize into Western-recognizable forms of sexual freedom).
The “outing” (and misrecognition) of “homophobic Uganda” by gay human rights discourse has also not sufficiently engaged with questions about how discourses of gender and sexuality are deployed by the state in the reconfiguration of respectability, domesticity, and intimacy (mediated by and mediating class and ethnic politics) within Uganda’s changing socioeconomic and political context. Especially considering the impact of neoliberal pressures to scale back or dismantle the provision of welfare by the state, the reconfiguring of domesticity and the closing down of “sexual and familial diversity” (Mulera, 2007; Oliver, 2013, p. 99) have had grave implications for the reconstitution of “the family” as the new agent of welfare and the resulting instrumentalization of this rhetoric by antigay discourse (see Sadgrove et al., 2012). Sadgrove et al. (2012, p. 103) have thus called for a “situated understanding” of the “deep imbrications of sexuality, family life, procreation and material exchange in Uganda,” which they view as crucially connected to discourses of “public morality and national sovereignty.” It is thus not surprising that “the principle” of the AHB is to “protect … the traditional heterosexual family” against homosexuality, which the Bill links to “the strengthening [of] the nation’s capacity to deal with emerging internal and external threats” (Government of Uganda, 2009, 2014). According to Sadgrove et al. (2012, p. 117), antigay discourse within Uganda represents homosexuality as a threat to “long-term social reproduction” (thus linking “homosexuality as death-drive” to national dissolution). Yet Hoad (2007, p. 57) claimed that “in the African context and perhaps also in a more generalized postcolonial one, the bourgeois nuclear family is seen as the proper intimate form of modernity,” despite the fact that same- (and different-) sex intimacies and practices have historically had a range of significations in terms of kinship and relationality (see also Lewis, 2011; Oliver, 2013; Tamale, 2009, 2013). In addition, Cheney (2012) located the invention of “the traditional family” within a discourse of postcolonial amnesia (which U.S. evangelical intervention has capitalized on), remarking that “it is striking how ‘the traditional family’ is invoked in the bill, when in fact Ugandans have always had very pliable family arrangements” (p. 86). She claimed that this invention is related not only to the rise of transnational evangelical homophobia in Uganda but also to the “overwhelming concern with population and fertility (as indicator of social stability)” (Cheney, 2012, p. 87). These claims suggest the need to further investigate how “homophobic countermobilization” (Weiss, 2013) might not only register a narrow response to the international call for “gay human rights” but might also be linked in more complex and contingent ways to postcolonial biopolitical projects that entangle with and respond to Western biopolitical projects and their devastating effects in the global South.
Drawing on Hoad (2007), Oliver claimed that the culturalist claim of “homosexuality is unAfrican” serves to manage the vulnerabilities brought on by neoliberal globalization while providing legitimacy for “authoritarian and hetero-patriarchal forms of power” that secure the hegemony of “political and religious leaders” (Oliver, 2013, p. 100). These vulnerabilities are, in part, produced by the ways in which neoliberal globalization has violently intervened in seemingly more “organic” conceptions of moral individual ethics in relation to collective reproduction (social, biological, and material), particularly when these more “indigenous” codes of relationality and “kinship solidarities” (e.g., Ubuntu sociality) jar with the neoliberal secular rhetoric of individual choice (including individual sexual object choice as espoused within gay human rights discourse; see Oliver, 2013)—anchored in “secular forms of personhood and identity encompassed by human rights discourses” (Sadgrove et al., 2012, p. 110). The contest between these different conceptions around ethical sociality is also connected to concerns about material welfare, as Sadgrove et al. (2012) have suggested. They argued for a perspective that understands how “same-sex relationships are read and become implicated in the complex networks of exchange and reciprocity” that relate to the ways in which the “moral and material reproduction” are intertwined, (Sadgrove et al., 2012, p. 106). They further posited that financial support or “incentivization” from transnational sources are assessed within a logic that links “public morality and profit,” (Sadgrove et al., 2012, pp. 116-117). Whereas funding from Western donor agencies advocating gay rights is viewed as corrupting, evangelical doctrines of prosperity are constructed, in contradistinction, as “a morally responsible materialism”—one that does not prioritize individual accumulation over collective good. As such, “discourses about materialism in relation to same-sex activity therefore can be read as both reflecting and constituting anxieties about the moral order and the threat of new moral identities” (Sadgrove et al., 2012, pp. 116-117). In this vein, might we view the AHB/AHA as an attempt to redraft the ethical limits between collective responsibility and individual choice (the AHB specifically casts homosexuality as an unnatural choice) within the vulnerabilities produced under global neoliberalism? The highly insightful analysis offered by Sadgrove et al. (2012) suggested that the framing of “gay human rights” as a new formation of global ethical conduct not only is simplistic but also forecloses a more contingent yet necessary discussion about ethics within an uneven terrain of vulnerabilities generated under neoliberalism.
Perhaps the wider socioeconomic and political context in which the Anti-Homosexuality Bill/Act emerged is also connected to deeper “existential uncertainties” (Finnström, 2008) that trouble Uganda’s historically present national project. According to Baines (2010, p. 143): “Since President Yoweri Museveni captured Ugandan state power in 1986 with the promise of liberating the country from the travails of its colonial past, Ugandans have simultaneously experienced peace and war, prosperity as well as economic impoverishment, and a crisis in security alongside increased protection.” In reviewing Finnström (2008), Dolan (2009), and Buckley-Zistel (2008), Baines highlighted Uganda as situated “in between war and peace” based on these authors’ investigation of the violent conflict in Acholiland in northern Uganda between the Acholi-lead Lord’s Resistance Army and Acholi civilians that led to the burgeoning of displacement camps (see also Otunnu, 2002); the Ugandan government’s (U.S.-backed) support of and exploitation of this conflict (through Museveni’s discourse of Acholi fratricide) to consolidate the hegemony of the south over the north; and the heightening antagonism between the Museveni regime and the Iteso in East Uganda. Emerging from Baines’s review of these three texts and their investigation of war and conflict is a complex contextual picture of the problem-space in which peace and reconciliation are contentiously socially invented by the Ugandan state into a sense of nationness. The heightening of social vulnerability is also mired in the problematic of assessing and fixing “victim” and “perpetrator” subjects across these conflicts that is crucial to the project of citizenship and nation building.
These analyses do not only highlight the need to seriously consider the continuing impact of colonization and postcolonial conflict on the socioeconomic, political, and cultural issues identified by Tamale et al. above, but they also prompt a deeper investigation of the complex ways in which these different polities converge and diverge in terms of gender and sexuality within the context of global neoliberalism and their implications for (stabilizing or unsettling) Uganda’s national social fabric. Does the invention of peace and reconciliation—as a national project—depend on the production of discourses of national and human security that crucially hinge on national-normative configurations of gender, sexuality, family, domesticity, and so on? Might we read the “homosexuality is un-African” discourse as part of this national exercise of inventing tradition (i.e., the ahistorical assertion of a purely heterosexual Uganda)—to procure solidarity as a proxy to “shallow peace” (Buckley-Zistel, 2008; quoted in Baines, 2010) across a highly complex field of differencing—as a productive process that redraws the boundary between these differences and an imagined common enemy? Do these questions matter in understanding why “homophobic countermobilization” (Weiss, 2013), in the form of the AHB/AHA, has emerged as a viable state project related to truth-telling and postcolonial biopolitics (a project that involves “capturing victimage” [see Hoad, 1999] in the name of security)? More important, how might addressing these questions not only serve to provide a more complex picture of anti-queer animus in Uganda but also productively expose the limited terms of gay human rights discourse that has depoliticized issues around social and economic injustice? In framing these questions, I do not intend to deflect attention from the AHB/AHA and its potential violent effects on sexual minorities in Uganda but to insist that the question set “Is homosexuality/homophobia un-African?”—which anchors both “gay human rights” and “homophobic anticipatory countermobilization” discourses—offers a limited “horizon of intelligibility” (Scott, 1999) for addressing the complexities of vulnerability that have precipitated in Uganda within the context of neoliberal globalization.
Conclusion: Queer Necropolitics
For many scholars critical of the work of “the gay international” (Ahmed, 2011; Haritaworn et al., 2008; Massad, 2002), gay human rights discourse has inaugurated a new moment in the biopolitical and necropolitical projects of Western neoliberalism—one that continues to be deeply structured by race. Mbembe’s (2003) conception of necropolitics has highlighted the discursive apparatus through which Africa’s postcolonial condition is assessed “under Western eyes” (Mohanty, 1988) as indispensable to the functioning of Western biopolitics. For Mbembe (2003), necropolitics refers to the right of sovereign power to kill and violently dispose of especially racialized populations, rationalized as a technique of Western governance. Those who resist the biopolitical injunction of universalizing and Western-centric human rights discourses are discursively constructed as threats to humanity and thus marked for death. In this regard, Agathangelou’s (2013) critical investigation of Hillary Clinton’s speech to the UN on LGBT human rights brings into sharp relief “how the queer is constituted as value in a speculative economy (i.e. as the rational basis for passing laws that integrate them as capacious civil subjects) that reconfigures capital and globality … requiring Black bodies to be bio-available” (pp. 455, 457). This implies that the efficacy and securitization of “gay human rights” as an apparatus of homonationalist modernity depends on conjuring up the vulnerability and disposability of nation-states and populations marked as insurgent, in this case, through their “homophobic legal countermobilization.” For Agathangelou, the production of such disposability depends on
rendering non-Western sovereign states as failed states … [in part, through] a move to fetishize human rights protection discourses and practices, which are voiced as legal and ethical responses to failure of states, economies and families through a more generalized biopolitics that concerns itself with ‘the freedom of queers’ all the while displacing the necropolitics that consolidate such freedoms and economic relations. (Agathangelou, 2013, p. 454)
As such, gay human rights discourses are, in part, instrumental in the production of vulnerability and its projection onto racialized Black populations whose vulnerability and disposability are linked to their refusal of Western biopolitical mechanisms such as gay political-legal rights.
The international gay human rights panic around Uganda’s AHB/AHA has hovered surreptitiously around the (simulated and actualized) figure of the queer Ugandan as victim of impending national fratricide and genocide and used by international human rights speculative discourses to plug “African homophobia” more seamlessly into a longstanding colonial discourse of “Africa/Blackness as genocide.” The public outing of homosexuals by the Ugandan magazine Rolling Stone (2010) (during the Bill debates in parliament) and the tabloid Red Pepper’s (2014) exposé of the country’s “200 top homos” the day following the Bill’s assent—not to mention the actual scope of criminalization within the Act (that previously included the death penalty)—have gone viral through Western anti-homophobia campaigns that have associated state-sponsored homophobia in Uganda with a death drive imagined as ontologically African. Alongside activist statements against the Ugandan Bill/Act, many of these campaigns seem to convey a uniform proclivity toward homophobia and the genocide of gays across the African continent (highlighting homophobia in countries such as Nigeria, Malawi, and Zimbabwe), through their mobilization of recurrent tropes of “contagion,” “epidemic,” and “surges, winds and waves of homophobia” sweeping the continent (Coly, 2013; Nyong’o, 2012; Thoreson, 2014). These discursive tactics serve to naturalize African states as inherently and internally operating through a death drive, which, for Nyong’o, (2012, p. 42) functions as “a racialized form of the death drive itself.” For Nyong’o (2012, p. 42), these “discourses of Africa as the wellspring of enthusiastic, orgiastic violence link the excitability of primitive vitality to the unpredictable but catastrophic expenditure of waste or disposable life”—the metanarrative that activates the missionary rhetoric of human rights interventions on the continent. Yet Nyong’o argued that we need to deconstruct this naturalizing and fetishizing discourse of “necropolitical Africa” by questioning the structuring of risk and vulnerability within the context of global neoliberalism. In this regard, Agathangelou (2013) claimed that gay human rights discourse emerges out of and proliferates neoliberalism, as a “speculative economy” through which the value of Western conception of queerness depends crucially on the racialized production of bodies and subjects of waste and vulnerability. This production also concerns the ways in which “the gay international” helps to extend the reach of Western biopolitics (i.e., “the White gay man’s burden”) in its prospecting for global (citizenizable) subjects—that is, saving LGBT Ugandans (and the question of LGBT Ugandan agency remains ambiguous here). It is interesting to note that Nyong’o claimed that
such racialized reason [of the proclivity of Blackness with the death drive]—and the various technologies of segregation, apartheid, and quarantine that colonial and neocolonial regimes have developed as a consequence—is rarely brought up in the contemporary debate around the efficacy of remote activism organized under the rubric of human rights. (2012, p. 42)
Agathangelou’s and Nyong’o’s arguments imply that the efficacy of Western biopolitical projects, now enlivened through their queer futurities, are intimately dependent on the racialized projection of necropolitics onto those who refuse to make themselves bio-LGBT-available—as compliant agents of the human rights industrial complex.
While Nyong’o explores the politics of this transnational human rights formation in the context of communicative capitalism (building on work by Dean, 2009) to specifically deconstruct the “waves of techno-euphoria” produced by Anti-Bill campaigns online, the broader implication of Nyong’o’s argument concerns the value of this incitement as a speculative exercise in a Western neoliberal Western context. Tamale (2013, p. 36) made a pointed observation about the racialized geopolitical value of aligning Africa with Europe’s homophobic past: “Indeed, while Africa is today being reinvented as a heterosexual continent, Europe is being reconstructed in terms of sexual democracy.” Might we read the discursive coproduction of both “heterosexual Africa” (see Epprecht, 2008) and “Western homoexceptionalism” as a transnational speculative exercise (following Agathangelou’s discussion)? In other words, do homonationalist circuits of power/knowledge facilitate the decategorization of “heterosexuality/heternormativity” and “homophobia” in the global North and their subsequent transferal and naturalization onto nations in the global South? The making of homoexceptionalism or a posthomophobic global North depends on reinventing homophobia within the West as an individual issue (litigated through hate crime legislation), disconnected from the structural and institutional conditions that shape anti-queer animus. This process is no doubt made possible through the racialization of homophobia through which the discourse of “heterosexuality/homosexuality” is racially recoded to police racialized populations within and outside Western nations. For Oinas (2011), homoexceptionalism in the West also “refers to the way homosexuality is tolerated on the symbolic level as long as it does not threaten the normative heterosexuality” Oinas (2011, p. 11). This not only marks the West as liberal and tolerant but also depends on marking the boundary between those who are categorically homophobic and therefore excessively intolerant. As such, Oinas (2011, p. 12) referred to the spectacularization and scandalizing of “African homophobia” by Western mass media (e.g., the BBC documentary Is Homosexuality Un-African? in 2011) as “discursive maintenance work for Westernized moral superiority”—a process that, I might add, is crucial to Western discourses of securitization. While we struggle to make sense of the seeming incompatibility between anti-imperial postcolonial nationalism and nonnormative sexualities, Hoad has suggested that we also need to reverse this struggle to also historicize and particularize global gay human rights discourse, especially since “much of the initial human rights documentation in the West arises from asylum cases that have a vested interest in making conditions appear as bad as possible elsewhere” (2007, p. 61).
From this perspective, might we return to Coly’s (2013, p. 25) question (“Why is antigay legislation and ‘re’legislation taking place on the continent now?”) to further pose critical questions about the hailing force of “queer necropolitics” (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014) within a Western biopolitical agenda? In other words, how can we see the temporality of antigay legislation and U.S. Christian intervention in Uganda as coalescing with the temporality of biopolitics in the West, especially when, according to Tamale (2013, p. 33), “Western governments today are churning out new and ever more intricate regimes of discrimination”? Tamale’s statement points not only to the operation of racialized necropolitics within the West but also to how Africa is instrumentalized as a “screen” (Nyong’o, 2012, p. 53) onto which necropolitics is projected outside the West’s ontology and modus operandi. This project is in part concerned with a temporal realignment (as a straightening) of the global South, as Traub (2008) suggested in her critical discussion of the epithet “the past is a foreign country.” In the context of “the gay international’s” viral panic around Uganda’s AHB/AHA, Nyong’o claimed that “Ugandan LGBT folk are depicted through the metaphor of the closet, globally and transhistorically construed and, through that metaphor, placed at a prior point in a historical development that the West has already progressed through” (2012, p. 50). Global LGBT activism is thus anchored in the primitivist premise that nations such as Uganda, believed to be located in anachronistic time, must be called into global disciplinary time (McClintock, 1995)—in this case, the moment of Western sexual modernity—through ceremonies of human rights surveillance and disciplining.
We see the continued deployment of such disciplinary mechanisms in announcements of cuts to international aid issued by Western donor countries (the very same countries aided by immigration and neocolonial expansion) such as the UK, the United States, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark, against Uganda. For example, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark have either fully suspended aid to Uganda or rerouted aid through human rights NGOs, while the World Bank indicated it “postponed a $90 million loan to Uganda over its anti-gay legislation” (Al Jazeera, 2014). Social justice activists have claimed that “such sanctions would exacerbate hostilities against sexual minorities, support the notion that homosexuality is a Western-sponsored idea, and most importantly, garner popular support for state-sponsored homophobia and homophobic African leaders” (Coly, 2013, p. 26)—not to mention the potential effect of further devastating Uganda’s socioeconomic situation. These moves on the part of Western governments in conjunction with “the gay international” lobby are premised on conceptions of global ethical conduct that derive from and reify Western frames of biopolitical governmentality; they are not viewed as instruments of Western neocolonial necropolitics that structure the “killability” (Agathangelou, 2013) and liquidation of noncompliant racialized populations. Instead, international aid cuts to Uganda prioritize the representational politics (over considerations of material inequality) that anchor homonationalism, through which these disciplinary tactics are rationalized as ethical. The international regulation of aid not only functions to punish but also to craft an ethical terrain through which the gay-friendly West manufactures its capacity to rightfully dispose of “homophobic Uganda”—that is, marking and attesting to the “untenability” of its population (Shaksari, 2013). Nyong’o (2012, p. 54) observed, “In their insistence on a binarism between an able and ethical world community and a disabled and corrupt African sovereignty, human rights interventions reveal their biopolitical basis, that is, their hope to intervene at the level of life.” The latest announcements of aid cuts to Uganda have also entered the already-established circuit of call-and-response, which has resulted in a principled oppositional posturing by Ugandan state authorities to guard the nation against imperial intervention. This comes across clearly in a Ugandan government spokesperson’s message on Twitter (mere days after President Museveni signed the AHA)—“The West can keep their aid”—which made headlines in the Telegraph (UK) (Telegraph, 2014). This response to the threat of aid cuts was also reiterated by Uganda’s Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity, James Butoro, who rationalized his stance on the basis of preventing moral destruction. Through this dialectical exchange, the term “homophobic nationalism” is at once a Western production that categorizes Uganda as anti-humanitarian and necropolitical as well as a discursive mechanism through which the Ugandan government calls itself (and is called) into place, in part, to galvanize its platform for anti-imperial sovereignty.
If, as Oliver (2013, pp. 100-101) has suggested, the contextual moment of the AHB/AHA is indeed a transnational one “taking on hybrid forms and articulations,” how might we continue to think through these complexities beyond the discourse of “Africa as problem”? Instead of a concluding statement, I think it more productive to raise a series of other questions, contrapuntally, that might productively redirect our critical vision to the effects of flashpointing the Ugandan AHB/AHA within this neoliberal moment (of universal gay human rights). How might the dominant question set “Is homosexuality/homophobia un-African?” be productively destabilized through a questioning of Western (sexual) exceptionality within neoliberal times—that is, as a discursive formation that depends on the production of multiple forms of violence deployed in the name of human population security? In addition, if the dialectical struggle for homoliberation has reached its pinnacle in the West through the discourse of gay rights—what Altman (2013) proclaims as “the end of the homosexual”—then might we also think of the internationalization of gay rights as a move that preempts the death/obsolescence of Western gay movement politics? In what ways does the fetishistic projection of a “necropolitical Africa” immunize the gay biopolitical agendas of Western nation-states that continue to rationalize the structural violence of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on in the name of national security? How does this immunity condition the limits of intelligibility of the human rights discourses of “the gay international” in ways that proliferate neoliberalism’s global governmentality? In other words, how might we “provincialize” Euro-American homo/nationalist framings of gay human rights discourse and interventions while being cautious that this questioning does not serve to further fuel state-sponsored anti-nonnormative rhetorics and rituals? Under what terms and through what sorts of “cross-cultural epistemologies” (Traub, 2008, p. 8) can we imagine dialogue about Western and non-Western sexualities as mutually beneficial, given that this layers onto distinct (yet not disconnected) genealogical formations on sexuality, selfhood, collectivity, biopolitics, ethics, and so forth across space and time—all of which continue to be unevenly inflected and organized under neoliberalism? If, as Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz (2005) have advocated, queer studies in the West must find ways to think through an “ethics of humility” (epistemological as well as political), what does this allow non-Western logics to do and still not (un)do, especially if the claims to and capacities born out of this “humility” further licenses the West to govern the rest in the name of a democratic humanity? These are difficult but pressing questions, responses to which may already be conditioned within the imminent foldings of an ever-virulent homonationalist modernity.