Respatialising the Global Imaginary of Gay Rights: Resisting Africana Epistemicide and Forging Solidaristic Imaginaries

• In Event: Global Queer/Trans Movements

Abstract

This article critiques the global imaginary of LGBTQ rights, arguing that dominant metrics of state-based human rights frameworks, what I term the Gay Rights International Movement (GRIM), reproduce anti-Blackness by aligning queerness with whiteness, modernity, and state legibility. These frameworks enact and rely on what I theorise as Africana epistemicide: the erasure of African ways of knowing gender and sexuality. Rather than merely misrepresenting queer lives, GRIM frameworks actively undermine Black queer solidarity by enforcing Western-dominated models of identity rights and justice.

In response, this article offers Solidaristic Imaginaries as a decolonial framework for rethinking queer political connection beyond nation-state borders, human rights penality, and colonial constructions of progressive vs. backwards. Through two case studies – queer activism in Nigeria’s #EndSARS movement and the CAISO Queer Archives of Trinidad and Tobago – I demonstrate how diasporic Black queer formations resist epistemic violence and enact alternative action infrastructures. These practices do not seek inclusion within GRIM’s legalist teleology, but instead foreground Black queer life as globally entangled, historically continuous, and epistemically central. The article ultimately calls for a radical respatialisation of queer political imaginaries, reorienting how Blackness is imagined in relationship to space, time and liberatory struggle.

Author

• SM Rodriguez, LSE