This final section assembles three chapters that address issues of citizenship, activism, and human rights from varied vantage points. Mary Hames’ chapter
‘Lesbian Students in the Academy: Invisible, Assimilated, or Ignored?’ focuses on the lived experiences of black lesbian student activists in a specific South African university. It reveals the extent of marginalisation (and to an extent, the erasure) that black lesbians face in the academy, but at the same time demon-strates multiple points of agentic activism. The second chapter, by Guillian Koko, Surya Monro, and Kate Smith’s, which analyses lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der, and queer (LGBTQ) forced migrants and asylum seekers who come from different countries across Africa to seek refuge in South Africa, takes a different approach and fills a void in the African scholarly discourse on the relationship between queer migration and LGBTQ human rights activisms. The chapter chal-lenges essentialising gender, sexuality, and culture in individual (and collective) expressions that relate to border politics. More than this, the chapter challenges the tacit assumption that, as Eithne Luibhéid puts it, ‘all the immigrants are het-erosexual’ and ‘all the queers are citizens’ ( 2004 : 233). After providing a snapshot of the discriminations faced by LGBTQ Africans in a number of countries, the chapter addresses international and South African human rights frameworks and the deficits in their implementation. Like the first and third chapter in this section, attention is paid to the diversities of lived experience and to agency, but there is a greater focus on social structures and their interpretation using intersectionality theory. The third chapter, Velile Vilane’s account of the experiences of transgen-der people in Swaziland, foregrounds the voices of a section of the Swazi popula-tion that faces severe human rights deficits and a lack of citizenship rights. Like Hames, Vilane zeroes in on lived experiences and highlights agentic actions via activism. However, he maps these experiences across three key domains: educa-tion, healthcare, and the legal system.
The chapters in their varied ways enhance and make an important contribution to the citizenship literature. As Richardson (2015 ) argues, sexual citizenship lit-erature is Western-focused. Some scholarship countering Western-centrism exists ( Epprecht 2013 ; Nyeck and Epprecht 2013 ), and this highlights the importance of homophobic nationalism amongst political leaders in some African countries.
The chapters in this collection help to counter notions of monolithic homophobic
134 Citizenship, activism, and human rights
nationalism by describing the identities and experiences of LGBTQ nationals in different African countries. They enrich the existing citizenship literature, includ-ing feminist ( Lister 1997 , 2011 ), race ( Mepschen et al. 2010 ), sexual and intimate ( Weeks 1998 ; Richardson 2000 , 2015 ; Plummer 2003 ), and transgender ( Monro 2005 , 2010 ; Hines 2013 ; Hines et al. 2018), with a particular emphasis on rights aspects ( Marshall 1950 ). Different aspects of lived experience that are relevant to citizenship studies are used in the various chapters. For example, Vilane’s chapter provides a sharp account of the way that the public-private divide plays out in the lives of transgender Swazis, whilst Hames’ chapter offers a topical contribution to lesbian and feminist citizenship studies.
Contemporary normative standards for the promotion of human rights have demonstrated limited potential to deal with deeply entrenched patriarchal power in African societies. At the same time, this has yielded useful frameworks for for-mulation of strategies to strengthen individual entitlements to sexual orientation and identities. Hames’ chapter draws on African feminism in a way that indicates the potentials and limitations offered by Western-based human rights concepts and discourses ( Bennett and Reddy 2015 ). Koko et al.’s and Vilane’s chapters demon-strate stark human rights deficits, not only in countries where human rights poli-cies for LGBTQ people are absent but also, in the case of Koko et al.’s chapter, in South Africa. All the chapters in this section of the volume seek to offer a more nuanced approach to advancing sexual rights amidst growing heteronormativity in the region and to provide possible entry points for furthering advocacy action, citizens’ activism, and resource mobilisation ( Ndashe 2011 ).
This section of the book also ‘speaks to’ other areas of scholarship, including postcolonial theory ( Hawley 2001 ) and development literature ( Cornwall et al.
2008 ). Notably, it advances southern intersectionality studies. There is a dearth of intersectional research in a southern context (see, however, Al-Rebholz 2013 ; Moolman 2013 ). Existing authors call for the use of intersectional frameworks and theory in a transnational context ( Choo 2012 ). Nkabinde’s (2008 ) work sug-gests that race, tradition, gender, and sexuality are routed through each other in the global South. The chapters in this collection all demonstrate this intersec-tional formation of identity. Hames’ chapter specifically explores intersecintersec-tional- intersectional-ity within the academy and black lesbian activism in South Africa. Koko et al.’s chapter develops an intersectional analytical framework for understanding the multiple marginalisations and persecutions faced by African forced migrants in South Africa. It addresses social forces that have often been overlooked in inter-sectional analysis, including nationality, spatial aspects, liveability, and poverty.
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