How Nonnormative Gender and Sexuality Became a Target of Violent Repression

• In Event: State Power and Political Identities

Abstract

Transgressors of gender and sexuality norms have been the targets of violent political repression around the world seemingly since the establishment of the state itself. This project contributes a new methodological approach, theory, and empirical analysis to answer the question, what drives persistent, pervasive, and violent political repression of people of nonnormative gender and sexuality? I theorize how gender and sexuality categories came to be politically and socially meaningful based on an historical analysis of the construction and contestation of these categories in three different African cases. In these cases, I explore how heterosexualizing policies and gender norms became bound up with key political, economic, and social institutions during colonialism and independence. This deep-seated investment in gender and sexuality norms explains why perceived norms transgressors have been persistently, pervasively, and violently treated as a threat to the state itself.

Author

• Kaden Paulson-Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison