Queer studies and religion in Southern Africa: The production of queer Christian subjects

Abstract The question of how to write about queer Africa has been a significant debate in scholarship over the last decade. One of the key emerging areas, in the development of ‘queer Africa scholarship’ has been through the framing of queer African subjects at the intersections with religion and in particular, Christianity. As scholars begin to further imagine queer African subjects as Christian, it is important to explore how and in what ways these subjectivities are constructed. In this article, I apply a qualitative analysis to academic literature that explicitly focuses on, or includes a substantive analysis of queer Christians and/or queer Christianity in Southern Africa. While Southern Africa is not representative of the entire continent, this region is a productive site within which to understand how queer subjects are imagined to be situated, what they are imagined to be doing and how they are imagined to be doing what they do. The context produces queer and LGBTI + (this acronym is sometimes preferred to 'queer' to refer collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and in various other ways as gender and/or sex non‐conforming.) subjects who find and make religious homes within legally permissive and restrictive countries and do so through a variety of normative, queer and normatively queer ways, thus revealing religious and sexual contradictions and boundary crossing. This has opened up numerous ways of understanding how religion can be negotiated and transformed in this region. I conclude by examining the theoretical and epistemological possibilities that are revealed through the current imaginings of queer Christian subjects in Southern Africa, as well as the potential these understandings offer for different spaces and new discourses in future scholarship.