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SUMMARY:On folles\, swageurs and other ambiançeurs\; popular culture and 
 queer extraversion in urban Congo  - Dr Thomas Hendriks (KU Leuven)
DTSTART:20151109T170000Z
DTEND:20151109T180000Z
UID:TALK61751@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:As in many contemporary African cities\, everyday life in urba
 n DR Congo is very much affected by a quest for connection. Amongst young 
 men\, this continuous search for being branché is often embodied in daily
  public performances of cosmopolitanism that have become central to the re
 definition of masculinity over the last decades. Moreover\, claiming conne
 ction also often takes place in public performances of transgression that 
 confirm one’s status in a demanding world in intergenerational oppositio
 n to older models of respectable masculinity. While these shifting gender 
 dynamics have been described and analysed in recent scholarly accounts of 
 youthful masculinity in contemporary Africa\, their queer(ing) implication
 s and possibilities often remain unnoticed in the field of African studies
 \, which is still very much dominated by unspoken heterosexist assumptions
  that take for granted the always-already “straight” nature of gender-
 normative bodies and desires.   This presentation illustrates how and why 
 male same-sex desires occupy an ambivalent but fundamental position in con
 temporary urban imaginations and cultural registers\, despite of (or\, per
 haps\, because of) omnipresent homophobias. Through ethnographic vignettes
  taken from my on-going fieldwork in Kinshasa and Kisangani and through ob
 jects and images taken from popular culture\, I will specifically highligh
 t the queer affordances of what is usually referred to as “ambiance” i
 n urban Congo. It is exactly within this morally ambivalent space of self-
 proclaimed libertarianism\, often defined in dialectical opposition to the
  spaces of church and family\, that erotically dissident men and boys enga
 ge with one another in often surprisingly visible ways. This space of ambi
 ance\, where performances of gender transgression and fashionable cosmopol
 itanism come together in fascinating ways\, allows for a queer rethinking 
 of the longue durée of extraversion that situates contemporary folles and
  swageurs in a longer genealogy of bills\, sapeurs and other ambiançeurs 
 in colonial and postcolonial urban Congo.
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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