ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical reading of the myriad ways in which female characters in selected fictional texts insist on their human dignity and seek access to the often slippery ideal of human rights in spaces where their agency is severely constrained by physical, psychological, discursive and epistemic violence. My analysis demonstrates how women’s access to discourses of human rights is limited by the shame, violence and fear that continue to structure understandings of lesbian sexuality in the different contemporary African spaces that serve as the settings for my selected texts.
