“Queering” Transitional Justice From African Decolonial Perspectives?

This chapter reflects on social and political settings with continuities of authoritarian and compulsive heterosexual regimes during colonialism and its aftermath. It looks to African decolonial feminism, queer theorizing, and activism to address the limitations and challenges of terms signifying (non)heteronormative people. These approaches question the inclusion of queer topics in concepts of transitional justice with their entanglements in neoliberal settings of gendered dealings with the aftermath of mass violence. They have been intertwined with processes of othering. In this chapter, “queering” indicates the necessity to scrutinize in which ways queer theory – just like other critical theories developed in Western contexts – contributes to and misses decolonized epistemologies from Southern perspectives.