Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana

Abstract

Knowing Women is an ethnography on friendship, desire, and same-sex intimacy among urban, working-class women in southern Ghana. The intersectional analysis of these women’s life narratives situates them in relation to political, economic and social developments affecting Ghana and other postcolonial and African countries, including anti-gay policies and queer activist movements. Paying close attention to the women’s practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as “knowing women” in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to such categories as lesbian or supi a southern Ghanaian term for female friend(ship). In doing so she critically refutes both African nationalist homophobic claims and universalizing claims that categories of LGBTI identities and can be translated between all languages and cultures. Engaging queer-feminist and postcolonial theories of gender, kinship, and sexuality, the book contributes to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been largely underrepresented.