Doctoral Degrees (English)
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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by Subject "African literature"
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- ItemVulnerability and agency : queer representations in contemporary literary and cultural texts from Sub-Saharan Africa(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Macheso, Wesley Paul; Viljoen, Shaun; Slabbert, Mathilda; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines representations of queer genders and sexualities in literary and cultural texts from sub-Saharan Africa written and/or produced in the twenty-first century. The analysis brings together life writing, short fiction, and filmic texts depicting the experiences of queer subjects from the region, which is notorious for homophobia and other forms of exclusion based on bodily performances in gender and sexuality. My focus is on assessing how these texts represent the vulnerability associated with queerness in the region and the ways in which the marginalised identities seek and attain agency amidst such vulnerabilities. The thesis further examines the ways in which these literary and cinematic representations function as agentic narratives giving voice, visibility, and audience to oppressed identities that are deliberately left to lurk on the margins of heteropatriarchal societies that thrive on maintaining heteronormative gender and sexual orders that satisfy the capitalistic demands of patriarchy for its sustenance. The study establishes that queer individuals in sub-Saharan Africa are rendered vulnerable because of the lack of recognition of their identities due to heteronormative discourses on gender and sexuality that inform permissible and/or non-permissible forms of being. The heteronormative commandments justifying queer exclusion are thoroughly interwoven in social, political, religious, and cultural norms advanced by authorities in the region. However, the study has found that representing these stigmatised lives in literary and cultural texts has the potential of granting them agency for fostering positive social change and reshaping the negative attitudes that mainstream societies have towards these identities. This agency for queer liberation proves to be crucial in securing possible unthreatened futures for queerness in sub-Saharan Africa.