Nation, Narrative and Archive: In Search of Queer Histories in Zimbabwe

This dissertation argues for a new genealogy for telling the history of queerness in Zimbabwe. State-sponsored histories have created a narrow, nationalist narrative that relegates queerness to the margins. This is a project that resides in those margins. By sinking deep into the spaces that queer bodies create for themselves in those margins, I develop a reading practice that disrupts existing narratives through the analysis of archives as cultural formations and demonstrating how changing how we constitute these formations can lead to narratives that can lead to freedom. I argue that the state’s political homophobia has an outsize role in defining the discourse on homosexuality in Zimbabwe and that this results in trauma-centred narratives or what Keguro Macharia would term negating spaces. Even when scholars focus on counter-narratives, we are still allowing the state to shape the language of the discussion and therefore limit what we can imagine. By being attentive to the myriad of ways that LGBTI Zimbabweans engage in social negotiations of identity, and the stories they tell, I theorize how LGBTI people are defining non-normative sexualities in Zimbabwe. LGBTI people are already actively engaged in the work of articulating distinctively African queer subjectivities. They are already imagining a different story. Through narrative interventions in four moments of queer history in Zimbabwe, I develop a reading practice that draws from Queer African Studies, to allow for a different Queer Zimbabwean narrative, one that centers the freedom and liberation of the marginalized. This reading practice disrupts existing narratives through the analysis of archives as cultural formations and demonstrating how changing how we constitute these formations can lead to narratives that can lead to freedom. My methods are informed by my creative writing practice as I work with storytelling as method. I also draw from indigenous oral traditions and indigenous Shona frameworks of the power of story to develop my method.

Department dc:contributor.department

Information Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Muchemwa, Chido Thelma

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cowan, T.L.

• Archives
• Queer African Studies
• Zimbabwe

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/130564

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/130564