Linking sexual and social hierarchies
Implications for LGBT human rights discourse and advocacy in Africa

I have been requested to talk about sexual rights and human rights. I consider the topic to be very broad and I have decided to narrow it down to focus on examining the linkages that exist between sexual and social hierarchies and how that affects organizing in the African continent. I have very little time, 10 minutes to talk about this, and I will attempt to be as short as possible.

Introduction

The current programs that CAL runs are researching the lived experiences of lesbian, bisexual and transgender women through recognition of multi-methodologies of doing research including creative writing, visual arts and oral her-story documentation. The coalition also aims to conduct capacity building and leadership development of feminist leaders and thinkers that will take the work of CAL to future generations. CAL also does direct advocacy work with the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. This work is directed at challenging states that have failed in their local jurisdictions to put measures and laws in place that protect the rights of sexual minorities.

Examining sexual hierarchy

I define sexual hierarchy as a system that has placed sexual expression/s in a scale of low to high, inferior to superior, better and bad, acceptable and unacceptable such that some forms of sexual expressions are considered to be better and more acceptable than other. This includes expressions of hetero-sexuality, sexual pleasure, intimacy, procreation, commerce-sexuality, homosexuality and homo-sexuality amongst others. Society for centuries has tended to view hetero-sexuality as the only highest form of sexual being. Anything that appears different from that form has been condemned. The result is that other forms of sexual expression like homo-sexuality and trans-sexuality have been condemned to be evil, non-cultural and deviant.

In a similar way issues of sexual pleasure, procreation and intimacy have been placed at a scale of privilege between men and women such that there continues to be a battle of the sexes on who has the privilege to enjoy sexual pleasure and intimacy and who does not. The hierarchy has taken society further to spheres where pro-creation and the right over one’s body is a decision field for a particular group of people at the expense of others. Often men have been privileged and chief beneficiaries of this system, where they got to decide when and how women should have children, when and how should women have sexual pleasure and whether they should even have sexual pleasure. This has manifested itself with cultural practices of female genital mutilation, where there is constant fear and pre-occupation with women’s clitoris and their ability to manipulate it in ways that they can pleasure themselves in ways that are sometimes even far better than the way men can do. The one way to thwart women’s own exploration and experience of sexual pleasure was to cut their very basic source of sexual pleasure, the clitoris. The result of this type of hierarchy is that there continues to be war against the clitoris that traditional communities seek to kill women’s pleasure to the benefit of male sexual pleasure and superiority. The notion of this practice is that women should just have a whole for men to penetrate, throw in a sperm and have them pregnant because their role is to please men and bear children

Social Hierarchies

The same principles apply to social hierarchies of nationality, gender, race, class, status, Age and privilege. Certain groups of people have been considered better than other others and society continues to re-enforce notions of difference as equivalent to notions of inequality. In many societies, this continues to be experienced, Africa experienced this through colonialism and continues to experience this through neo-colonialism where the needs to be a constant invisible hand of the west in anything that Africa does if it has to succeed. South Africa experienced this through racism, ethnic battles and class struggle where some people were better than others because of the their color of their skin, today, because of their level of education, employability status and privilege. The LGBT movement is not immune to this in that some of us are more privileged than others and therefore have access to opportunities than others. This makes us look better and more valued by our comrades than others. This results into a culture of elitism and carrier pathing even within the movement.

Movement from binaries and trinaries to fluidities

It is my grounded theory that there is no such a thing as static sexualities. Sexuality is fluid and therefore does not require boxes and labels that seek to imprison it into one form or the other. In the same spirit, I still believe in the politics of naming because it is naming ourselves as lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender that we can claim that political space and control that sphere for ourselves. However, naming it should not be a limitation of expressing the fluidity of sexuality. The two should not be confused in anyway.

The notion of hierarchies, boxes and labels has proven to be harmful to society historically. Innocent people have suffered under the box of racism, ethnic cleansing, class and so on. My contestation is that as much we cannot escape binaries, boxes and labels, we need to strive towards eradicating them with time and political relevance such that we attain a society where there are no hierarchies, labels and boxes that seek to confine our sexuality. We need to embrace the fluidity of sexuality and construct our own realities and not allow other people’s realities to be imposed on us.

Implications for human rights

The implication for operating in false notions of binaries and trinaries is that it limits our ability to organize as social movements. The experience has been for example that sexual reproductive rights activists would advocate for law reform strategies that are potentially harmful to the lives of lesbian and gay people and would not bother because they mostly view reproduction as an issue only for hetero-sexual people. The challenge is that it takes very long for to amend a piece of legislation once enacted. The implications last longer.

The social movement needs to get to a point where we are able to advocate for each other’s needs and defend each other’s gains. We can only achieve that if we think outside of the binaries and the boxes that hold us hostage. We need to have a constant dialogue amongst each other, gender activists, feminists, LGBT activists, researchers, academics, womanists and so on. We need to find points of convergence and commonalities in our struggles and focus on those in order to maximize our impact for law reform and a vibrant human rights culture in Africa.

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Note: This paper was presented at the International Resource Network (IRN) Africa meeting,
8-10 February 2007, Dakar, Senegal.
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See IRN Africa Meeting: FINAL REPORT

© 2007

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