ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the assumption that in sexuality discourse, there can be no exclusive affirmation of divisive categories. The chapter privileges cultural, linguistic, and spiritual symbolisms which articulate everyday staging of ‘transgressions’ and that highlight the limitations of human assumptions of absolute dichotomisation in African sexuality discourse. It foregrounds everyday and periodic rites of passage amongst the Ogu-speaking people of Southwestern Nigeria. The chapter contends that the rites are mediated by human communicative interactions that blur and, in some cases, reverse sexual roles while sometimes investing humanity with gender neutrality and hermaphroditic orientations, regardless of more popular affirmations to the contrary on the African continent. The assumption speaks to the blurring of ‘dichotomies’ in discourses of sexuality, sex, and gender. By relying on an experience of auto-ethnography, I argue that the imaginations interface and articulate with parallel symbolisms of ‘transgressions’ in Christian redemptive affirmations. While close reading the textual data that reference the blurring of gender lines in Ogu ontology, the discussion reinforces the parallels in Christian spirituality in order to further contest the rigidity of exclusive dichotomisation in African and global sexuality discourses. The chapter addresses both human-human relations and human-non-human relations.
