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ABSTRACT
The compelling nature of the recent dialogue between queer studies and postcolonial African literatures results, in part, from a contestation of the taboo of a queer Africa. Yet queerness is crucial to African literatures because so many of the cosmologies that inform these texts depend on gender-bending and intersexuality, and because in these texts, stepping outside of sexual and gender norms suggests political movement. This essay explores queerness as a driving force within African postcolonial literature through a reading of Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi's 1981 play Je soussigné cardiaque. A queer reading of this play begins an exploration of male homoeroticism disguised in postcolonial African texts as heterosexual economies and provides a consideration of how men display political capital through gender bending. Further, in my reading of Je soussigné cardiaque, I will consider the specific queer Kongo context in Labou Tansi's treatment of the gendered body.
The scholarship that has, in recent decades, sought to create a dialogue between queer studies and postcolonial African literatures has produced readings of homoeroticism and gender bending in African contexts by critics such as Chris Dunton (1989), Guarav Desai (2001), and Chantal Zabus (2009). The compelling nature of this critical work results, in part, from its contestation of the still unyielding taboo of imagining a queer Africa. Though several African literary texts can be read for homoeroticism and gender bending, most of the continent's authors do not dare to speak explicitly of queerness. And yet, queerness is a crucial aspect of African postcolonial literature, firstly because so much of the African cosmologies that inform these texts depends on gender-bending and intersexuality and secondly because, in these texts, stepping outside of established sexual and gender norms is concomitant with political movement, be it that of the revolutionary or of the tyrant.
This essay seeks to explore the potential of queerness, specifically homoeroticism and slippages between masculine and feminine personas, as a driving force within African postcolonial literature through a reading of Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi's 1981 play Je soussigné cardiaque. This study joins an on-going discussion of violence and power in the works of Labou Tansi, initated by critics such as Elieen Julien (1991), who writes on rape in La vie et demie (1979), Roger Ravet,...