Edited by Tanja Bosch, Nyx Mclean and Tony Roberts

Bloomsbury Academic, Digital Africa Series

Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2025 (see below for details).

We invite scholars, activists, and practitioners to contribute to an edited volume on Queer Digital Citizenship in Africa. Following the publications of Digital Citizenship in Africa (2023) and Feminist Digital Citizenship in Africa (2025), this book continues the exploration of digital rights, identities, and activism on the continent. This volume aims to explore how queer individuals and communities across the African continent engage with, resist, and reshape digital spaces to assert their citizenship, visibility, and rights. It seeks to challenge dominant narratives of queer exclusion and victimhood, by focusing on agency, activism, and community-building in online environments.

As Volpp (2017) argues, queer citizenship must be understood beyond formal legal rights, incorporating the lived realities of LGBTQI+ individuals who navigate exclusionary state structures while forging alternative spaces for belonging. In the African context, online platforms serve as vital arenas for such negotiations, where queerness is both contested and reimagined. Digital spaces have thus become critical for LGBTQI+ communities, offering platforms for advocacy, resistance, identity formation, and cultural production. This book will explore why queer Africans are using digital spaces to perform citizenship; what (dis)advantages digital spaces afford; and what (dis)benefits have been experienced. What can be done in online spaces that cannot be done in offline spaces in different countries across the continent? McLean and Mugo (2015) note that digital platforms enable queer African women to express their lived experiences, challenge dominant narratives, and establish counter-publics that redefine their social and political realities. Keeling (2014) further conceptualizes digital platforms as facilitating queer operating systems (Queer OS) that enable imaginative, unexpected, and ethical relations, thus transforming the social and political dynamics of queer communities.

While mainstream discourses often portray queer Africans as victims of oppression, digital environments provide avenues for self-representation, organizing, and community-building beyond state-sanctioned boundaries. However, these digital spaces are also sites of regulation, surveillance, and cyber violence, reflecting the broader contestations around queer citizenship. McLean and Mugo (2015) emphasize that despite the empowering potential of digital spaces, these platforms also become arenas where marginalized identities must negotiate increased visibility with the risks of surveillance and digital policing. Reddy, Monro, and Matebeni (2018) highlight how queer African activism is deeply embedded in both local and transnational struggles, challenging dominant state and societal structures while engaging with global discourses on LGBTQI+ rights.

Moving between the local and the transnational, queerness in Africa moves beyond extended categories of gender and sexuality towards a holistic citizenship that subverts hegemony and power (Nyanzi 2014; Matebeni 2017;). This subversion has afforded African LGBTQI+ new opportunities of ‘queering’ the digital space. This volume builds on interdisciplinary perspectives to interrogate how digital technologies facilitate or hinder queer belonging, activism, and cultural expression across African contexts. It aims to provide new insights into the intersections of gender, sexuality, technology, and citizenship in the African digital landscape.

We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines and methodological approaches, including but not limited to the below, and we encourage chapters that provide diverse case studies of queer digital citizenship:

• Digital Activism and Advocacy: How do queer Africans use digital platforms for advocacy, policy change, and resistance? What are the risks and rewards of online organizing?
• Social Media and Queer Visibility: How do platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram shape queer self-representation, discourse, and community formation in African contexts?
• Queer Digital Counter-publics: How do African queer individuals create alternative digital publics that resist mainstream homophobic and transphobic narratives? How do African queer individuals use coding, encryption, and other digital strategies for subversive digital practices?
• Online Surveillance and Digital Policing: How do African states and societies regulate and control queer digital spaces? What strategies do queer users employ to navigate censorship, cyber harassment, and surveillance?
• Queer Archives and Digital Memory: How are African LGBTQI+ histories being documented and archived online? What tensions arise between digital preservation and the risks of hypervisibility?
• Intersectionality and Digital Citizenship: How do race, class, gender identity, and disability intersect with queer digital experiences in African contexts?
• Queer Diasporas and Digital Connectivity: How do African queer diasporas engage with home communities through digital platforms?
• Popular Culture and Queer African Expressions Online: How do digital cultural productions—music, dance, art, memes—contribute to the articulation of queer African identities?
• Queer Play, Creativity, and Virtual Realities: How do African queer individuals use digital art and creativity, gaming, and virtual reality to imagine and inhabit joyful, affirming worlds? What role does digital playfulness have in fostering queer joy and self-expression?
• Queer Digital Intimacies and Relationships: How do digital technologies shape queer dating, relationships, and sexual cultures in African contexts? Inclusive of the negotiation of safety and desire in digital spaces. What are the creative ways of signalling queerness online while maintaining safety?
• Digital Economies and Queer Livelihoods: How do African queer individuals engage in digital economies for survival? Inclusive of gig work, crowdfunding and other forms of online labour that offer economic agency in contexts of discrimination.

Submission Guidelines

We invite extended abstracts of +/-800 words that outline the chapter’s argument, methodology, and relevance to the volume’s theme. Please include a reference list, and a short biography (150 words) with your submission.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2025

Submissions should be sent to tanja.bosch@uct.ac.za with the subject line “Queer Digital Citizenship in Africa – Chapter Proposal.”

References

Keeling, K. (2014). Queer OS. Cinema Journal, 53(2), 152–157.

Matebeni, Z. (2017). Southern perspectives on gender relations and sexualities: A queer intervention. Revista de Antropologia, 60(3), 26-44.

McLean, N., & Mugo, T.K. (2015). The Digital Age: A Feminist Future for the Queer African Woman. IDS Bulletin, 46(4), 97–100.

Nyanzi, S. (2014). Queering Queer Africa. In Matebeni, Z. (Ed.), Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities (pp. 65-70). Athlone, Cape Town: Modjaji Books.

Reddy, V., Monro, S., and Matebeni, Z. Introduction. In Queer in Africa: LGBTI Identities, Citizenship and Activism.

Volpp, L. (2017). Chapter 8. Feminist, Sexual and Queer Citizenship. In The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship. Oxford University Press, UK.