University of Chicago Press
Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya
Key Metrics
- George Paul Meiu
- University of Chicago Press
- Paperback
- 9780226830582
- -
- -
- Social Science > Anthropology - Cultural & Social
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the homosexual threat they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially virile construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
Author Bio
George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; belonging, citizenship and the state; race and ethnicity; and the political economy of postcolonial Africa.
In his book, Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Meiu explores how the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality shapes collective attachments and relations of age, gender, and kinship in Kenya. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, he investigates how young Samburu men perform their ethnic identity through colonial images of the ethnic, sexual warrior, in order to engage in intimate relationships with European women, acquire wealth, and build futures. The book examines the myriad implications that etho-erotic commidification has for how Samburu negotiate belonging. Meiu's book received the Ruth Benedict Prize of the Association of Queer Anthropology, the Nelson Graburn Book Prize of the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group, and is a finalist of the Elliot P. Skinner Book Award of the Association for Africanist Anthropology.
Meiu is coeditor of Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (Indiana University Press, 2020), a book that examines the growing global entanglements of ethnicity in market dynamics, nationalism, and consumption.
Currently, Meiu is finishing a book, entitled Queer Objects: Intimacy, Citizenship, and Rescue in Kenya, to address a growing trend that involves political and religious leaders, non-governmental organizations, and the citizenry in securing collective morality from the so-called “perversions of globalization.” Exploring panics over various objects deemed troublesome, Meiu approaches intimate citizenship in relation to pollution, materiality, sociality, desire, and fear.
His work appeared in the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, Anthropology Today, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and in edited volumes on tourism, sexuality, and the history of anthropology.
Meiu holds a BA in anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he won the Daniel F. Nugent Prize for the best dissertation in historical anthropology.
Source: Harvard University
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