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Knowing Women is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. 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 categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This chapter examines five contexts together with their associated gender terminologies, in order to pursue how same-sex-desiring subjects forge themselves in the crucible of words, space, and time in Chinese-speaking contexts. The five contexts, namely, the theatre, the bar, the school, the movement, and the family. In the Chinese literary imagination, the world of banquets, vocal performance, and operatic theatre is most reliably associated with the representation of sexuality. In contemporary Chinese fiction, the school romance continues to be haunted by the relative perfection of the love between the young women and the disappointments of marriage and motherhood. The abolition of the polygynous household and a range of associated social identities constituted a major site for the institution of Chinese modernity throughout the twentieth century. The legitimacy of new state regimes was consolidated under the new protocol of a monogamous heteronormativity.
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