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 Periodical article |
| Title: | 'It's a Silent Trade': Female Same-Sex Intimacies in Post-Colonial Ghana |
| Author: | Dankwa, Serena Owusua |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Periodical: | NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (ISSN 0803-8740) |
| Volume: | 17 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Pages: | 192-205 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Ghana |
| Subjects: | homosexuality lesbianism |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740903117208 |
| Abstract: | While in many places same-sex cultures revolve around politically charged subcultural understandings, this paper explores conceptualizations of female same-sex desire beyond constructions of lesbian identity. It looks at a set of practices forged by women who are involved in intimate same-sex relationships in southern Ghana and examines how their self-understandings resist and intersect with the derogatory media representations that frame them. A key term to these representations is the term supi. It implies a close friendship between two adolescent girls, whether or not their relationship has a sexual dimension. In spite of rising tides of homophobia that impact such female intimacies, two factors still allow for the creation of niches for same-sex intimacy: first, southern Ghanaian cultures draw on norms of verbal indirection and discretion, which allow for the concealment of non-normative sexual conduct. Secondly, homosocial spaces of intimacy provide an environment in which female same-sex bonds are expressed through a language of allusion rather than a specialist, subcultural vocabulary. Erotic context is formed through practice and performance and is not discursively named or understood as a social identity. Rather, these understandings of female same-sex passions revolve around the notion of secrecy and are based on tacit but vibrant forms of knowledge. |
