A phenomenological study of the gendered and sexualised politics of a lesbian identity in contemporary Zimbabwe

Abstract

This thesis examines the gendered and sexualised politics of a lesbian identity in contemporary Zimbabwe. Recent writings of well-intentioned scholars, memoirists, bloggers and LGBTQ+ activists that are writing about African lesbian women have largely constructed them as passive victims, trapped in a history of political homophobias and the abusive hegemony of Western ethnocentric discourses that have objectified, erased or even violated African women’s bodies. In these scenarios lesbian women are portrayed as passive bodies on which different forms of gendered and sexualised power act. While great injury and harm has indeed come to some lesbian women, such a limited reading of lesbian lives, and experiences belies the complex ways in which power operates in both liberating and disempowering ways and how it is navigated and resisted by those it is directed at. Drawing on extensive field work I demonstrate firstly how individual and unique the identity formation journeys are and how despite the extreme and in some cases violent force of compulsory heterosexuality individuals still come to same-sex identities. Secondly, I argue that by using a phenomenological approach, African sexualities can be reimagined and explored to generate more than just new data sets, and instead provide new information and understandings of lesbian identity. Finally, through in-depth examination of participant narratives I argue that there is no unitary understanding of lesbian identity and that only those who identify as such can define what the identity means to them as well as shed light on the ways in which the identity is negotiated and navigated.