A Queer Dream of New and Unassimilable Things

queer

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER x SEXUALITY

A Queer Dream of New and Unassimilable Things

As the rest of the world watches the exodus of American users from TikTok to RedNote, it reveals a telling paradox: Western claims to digital freedom depend on portraying contexts like Africa and Asia as uniquely hostile repressive Others, while masking their own suppression of queer expression—a power dynamic that the Global South has long been co-opted to maintain.
queer

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER X SEXUALITY

A Queer Dream of New and Unassimilable Things

As the rest of the world watches the exodus of American users from TikTok to RedNote, it reveals a telling paradox: Western claims to digital freedom depend on portraying contexts like Africa and Asia as uniquely hostile repressive Others, while masking their own suppression of queer expression—a power dynamic that the Global South has long been co-opted to maintain.

The recent exodus of American users to the Chinese social media platform, RedNote, amid the now Trump-halted TikTok Supreme Court ban has sparked multiple discourses around citizen apathy about data privacy, battling data empires, and more recently, RedNote’s alleged suppression of LGBTQ+ content. The news, which quickly triggered several posts across social media platforms, ‘first-hand’ reports, and opinions from both liberal and anti-woke users online originated from a news media platform that described itself as the ‘world’s leading source on LGBTQ+ information.’ Yet there was something more profound that this digital migration revealed: how anti-gay laws and digital restrictions outside the West serve as essential props for maintaining Western claims to moral authority over LGBTQ+ rights while masking the actual containment of LGBTQ+ communities in the West. 

As a doctoral scholar of African feminist digital cultures and technology studies, observing this from both my American and Nigerian locations, I am struck by how this digital migration of users currently referred to as ‘TikTok refugees’ mirrors broader patterns of queer displacement. This movement reveals complexities of power, assimilation and survival that extend far beyond simple narratives of censorship versus freedom, as the very framing of Chinese digital spaces as uniquely hostile to queer expression exposes a fundamental contradiction within the US’s liberal democratic and self-appointed role as global protector of LGBTQ+ rights. This contradiction becomes especially apparent with recent developments, as a narrative of Western digital exceptionalism conveniently obscures how similar restrictions operate within American platforms, especially with this news coming just days away from Meta’s platform governing decisions: shutting down its system for moderating fake news, implementing dehumanizing moderation policies against trans people, abandoning its diversity, equity and inclusion programme, permitting homophobic and transphobic speech across its platforms, and getting a MAGA makeover less than four years after the platform banned Trump for inciting the January 6 riots. This exemplifies exactly how Western platforms can engage in speech suppression precisely because the existence of supposedly more restrictive spaces elsewhere maintains their image as relatively exceptional havens of freedom. 

THE PARADOX OF WESTERN MORAL AUTHORITY

There is a core contradiction when we examine how anti-gay laws in Africa and elsewhere actually work to advance Western interests. The laws create a necessary foil against which Western nations can perform their supposed exceptionalism, while simultaneously providing opportunities for selective moral outrage that masks their own forms of LGBTQ+ containment. Consider US senator, Ted Cruz’s June 2023 criticism of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s death penalty for queer lives as ‘horrific and wrong,’ when Cruz himself had campaigned against US same-sex marriage equality and called it an ‘attack on religious liberties.’ This Western insistence on framing queer liveness as something that can only exist albeit unpredictably within its borders creates a spiral of power and discourse that ultimately serves to maintain hierarchies, where states and their power brokers designate worthy and unworthy lives. 

This dynamic of this repression serving Western interests finds its theoretical roots in the scholarship of Jasbir Puar, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. She famously coined the term homonationalism to describe a temporal and spatial illusion where, ‘certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects.’ In this superficial construction, exceptional queers are doomed to constantly replay and restage their exceptionalism by casting themselves against poor, carceral and irredeemably homophobic contexts like Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, saying, ‘Look, they kill gays there, we are so lucky America permits us to exist.’ As Puar suggests, by folding themselves into nationalist projects to legitimize themselves, their exceptionalism depends entirely on the necropolitics of queer lives across the pond. Cameroonian historian and political theorist, Achille Mbembe, describes necropolitics as contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death which accounts for forms of social existence in which populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. 

Early this month, I read a 2003 United States Supreme Court case, Lawrence v. Texas (2003)— which is a landmark decision in the country’s LGBTQ+ rights and privacy law. The court ruled that states cannot criminalize private consensual sexual activity between adults of the same sex, as such laws violate the constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Reading this case, the dissent of former Supreme Court Associate, Justice Antonin Scalia, stood out, especially its particular wording: ‘This decision would lead to a slippery slope in which no form of sexual conduct, no matter how socially undesirable, could be constitutionally prohibited.’ It is especially worth noting that while this case protected the right to intimate relations between individuals in the privacy of a home, it remained unclear about establishing homosexual intercourse as a fundamental right. I turn here to Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality as it helps us understand why Scalia’s statement particularly reflects a social order where power structures—in this case, courts and legislature—categorize, control and normalize sexuality. 

Foucault argues that contrary to assumptions about Victorian-era sexual repression after the 19th century, western European society actually increased discourse about sex, leading to new forms of power and population management—a framework that travelled globally through English criminal laws in colonial times. Society divided sexuality into ‘legitimate’ (associated with married couples, procreation, and private spaces) and ‘deviant’ (non-procreative acts relegated to marginalized spaces like prisons, brothels and mental institutions). Various institutions—including education, medicine, psychiatry and statistics—contributed to discussions about sex by creating and categorizing multiple fragmented sexualities that served as a foil to normalize ‘good’, ‘proper’ and state-desirable procreative sexuality. This naming and categorizing of a ‘us vs others’ created a spiral through which sexuality functions in modern society—why governments and institutions constantly talk about, categorize, and analyze sexuality, and why many anti-homosexuality laws in Africa are colonial inheritances. Therefore, contemporary complaints about an ‘excessive’ expression and focus on sexuality in the 21st century miss how this very proliferation of discourse was triggered by the institutional mechanisms from the 19th century, where the very institutions created to regulate sexuality have produced a condition where we cannot stop talking about it, especially within the context of state and institutional, and now ‘platformized’, tolerance and promises of liberation. 

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QUEER EXPORTATION AND EXTERNALIZED FREEDOM

What is particularly fascinating for me is how the homonationalist anxieties and queer digital migrations in the US mirror physical patterns of queer displacement across the African continent. Many African governments participate in what we might call ‘queer exportation’—tacitly encouraging LGBTQ+ people to seek asylum abroad while maintaining homophobic legislation at home. This creates a condition of externalized freedoms, where liberation is perpetually positioned elsewhere, never within reach at home. Yet within this seemingly binary choice between Western assimilation and African necropolitics, what Cuban American academic, José Esteban Muñoz, refers to as pragmatic rights discourse and assimilationist politics emerge. This strategy involves careful navigation of state power where certain queer figures become ‘acceptable’ precisely because they create an illusion of freedom that allows other forms of queerness to exist in the shadows. This is not a simple capitulation to power but rather a strategy hinged on a constant audition of belonging, what Muñoz describes as ‘privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and “rational” expectations.’ 

However, the manifestations of homonationalism and how it almost always exceptionally fails in queer necropolitical contexts is not my main focus in this essay. But rather how the liberal-democratic versus conservative power tussles in the United States inevitably affect Africans and the rest of the world, from the conservative diffusions overturning women’s rights to those further restricting non-existent queer rights on the continent. The dependency and perpetual debt conditions of many African nations mean that we flow with the tide of whatever government directs the affairs of the US and the rest of the Western world. Currently, Africa may no longer need to maintain an illusion of gender/sexuality progressiveness for loans and favours, as the Euro-American conservative anti-rights oligarchy can now fill the void with their investments in using Africa as a foil against Western liberalism and ‘wokeness’. This perpetual coloniality continues morphing into forms that keep Africa tethered between the civilizing missions of both liberals and conservatives—a condition that enables Euro-American exceptionalism no matter which direction we turn. On the one hand, the rhetoric becomes ‘save your children’ led by pro-family and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and on the other hand, African overlords prescribing death for queer lives, are confronted by the BBC or CNN white male host, demanding a ‘human’ response. 

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A DECOLONIAL RESISTANCE

For African queer communities seeking to resist this binary, historical recovery has been one strategy against the projection of Africa as essentially heterosexual. Black rhetoric scholar, O.M. Olaniyan, calls this resistance against homophobia in African continental and diasporic contexts ‘an anti-colonial project of recovering history,’ where the ‘temporality of language is used to support worldmakings of belonging.’ However, Olaniyan further offers a practice that exceeds using strategic essentialism to create this queer historical place. They argue that we must also actively work to unsettle those same essentialisms (what they term ‘(dis)placing’) as we navigate between Western and indigenous frameworks. Olaniyan describes this as ‘eternally displaceable strategic essentialism’—a necessary, albeit risky, queer anti-colonial practice where we temporarily claim essential identities while remaining ready to shift and reimagine these claims as needed, recognizing that no single framework can fully capture queer African experiences. On the one hand, by pulling back from externalized freedom elsewhere to a historical place back home, we may begin to make queer claims to time and space that insist queerness is indigenous to Africa, as evidenced by the existence of the Yan Daudu and several other indigenous forms of queer expression embedded within African spirituality. On the other hand, there are limitations to a queer project that relies solely on historical recovery, particularly when expressing our decolonial desire to name queer identity in indigenous African languages and describe ourselves outside Western linguistic frameworks. 

In a previous article,An African Feminist Manifesto’, I argued, supported by several African feminist scholars, that Yorùbá social relations and understanding of identity are structured differently from Western categories. When attempting to translate Western LGBTQ+ concepts into Yorùbá, we risk imposing Western conceptual frameworks onto a language that organizes meaning differently. Olaniyan demonstrates this through the term adófùr, a Yorùbá compound word describing a sexual act. Attempting to translate this term into identity categories like ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ reveals a fundamental epistemological tension: Western terms often describe states of being (what one is), while adófùr describes acts of doing (what one does). This distinction, reminiscent of feminist philosopher and Gender Studies scholar, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, suggests how Yorùbá language inherently understands sexuality through action and performance rather than fixed identity categories. 

This presents both an epistemological challenge and a core paradox in decolonial queer activism: the desire to escape colonial language also finds us disrupting indigenous languages to express contemporary queer identities. Inferred from African Queer Studies scholar, Anima Adjepong’s work, we might consider how linguistic ‘pockets of freedom’ demonstrate queerness, finding expression not through grand declarations of identity but through subtle manipulations of existing cultural norms. For example, queer partners strategically switch from English to Twi or Yorùbá—languages without gendered third-person pronouns—when referring to their partners, encoding an African queer existence through these linguistic affordances. 

These pockets of freedom create an opportunity for what Muñoz calls ‘disidentification’—a negotiation and fashioning of queer communities by working on, with, and against dominant ideologies to transform these into new possibilities for minority activism and survival. For African queer communities, this creates a web of choices and strategies beyond the simple binary of visibility versus invisibility. As we have established, the promise of digital freedom through Western platforms comes with its own forms of erasure and assimilation. However, we must also affirm how marginalized queer people utilize these platforms to become visible and simultaneously deconstruct the conditions of that visibility—particularly refusing to simply become poster children for homonationalist rhetoric and American exceptionalism. This resistance challenges both the superficial figure of the neoliberal, urban, and socially mobile queer African subject and the stereotype of helpless recipients of Western paternalist donors’ graciousness. Here, perhaps, the American queer can learn something from a non-American queer perspective. 

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DREAMING NEW FUTURES FROM WITHIN

The dream of ‘new things’ is not about finding perfect spaces elsewhere—digital or otherwise— for unrestricted expression; such spaces do not exist. Instead, it is about recognizing and building upon the strategies queer communities already employ to create meaning and connection within constrained circumstances, as Chinese queer communities already do on RedNote, other social media platforms and offline. Similarly, African queer activists have utilized platforms as undercommons and fugitive spaces, using unpredictable spelling variations and collective strategies to commune within deliberate filter bubbles. Of course, there are inherent risks, especially when offline violence bleeds into online spaces as we have witnessed cases of violence stemming from heteronationalist lurkers exposing online identities.

However, as demonstrated by movements like #EndSARS and #QueerNigerianLivesMatter, queer activists have successfully navigated both state surveillance and platform algorithms to establish networks and discursive spaces that resist conceptions of police violence which erase the experiences of women and queer lives. Similar outcomes have emerged across Africa, from Ghana to Kenya and beyond, where even within carceral contexts, the barriers excluding queer people have been challenged through multiple scales of resistance and coalition-building.

The RedNote controversy therefore reveals all at once the limitations of digital platforms, the self-centeredness of American digital migration anxieties, and the broader power structures that shape how queerness is understood, controlled, and survived globally. Our options extend beyond simply choosing between Western or Eastern models of digital existence or merely critiquing both. Rather, we must document and theorize the complex ways queer communities navigate imperfect and non-existent freedoms while imagining possibilities that transcend these constraints entirely. In doing so, we might move beyond both the false promise of elsewhere and the limitations of pragmatic assimilation, toward a queer future that remains unassimilable to any single system of power. This is the true dream of new things⎈

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