Gender Taboos and Homophobia in Unoma Azuah’s Embracing My Shadow: Growing Up Lesbian in Nigeria.

Abstract

In sexual politics, queer is a concept that describes atypical sexual
preferences and descriptive of a minority that do not subscribe to the
conventional gender heterosexual identity. The Nigerian society like many
other heteronormative societies is fixated in its delineation and acceptance
of sexuality and gender. Non-conformity by anyone to the same means can
subject you to any form of homophobia. Nigeria has a queer community.
However, legislation in Nigeria still prohibits homosexual relations,
prescribing as much as fourteen years imprisonment as punishment for
this in Nigeria’s Criminal Code Act. With diverse calls for the respect of
human rights across the globe, Nigeria and Africa at large still cringes
at the knowledge of a queer identity and treat same as socio-culturally
alien. Thus, this paper examines the emergent concept of queer in
Nigerian literature and the relationship between queerness and selfhood in Embracing My Shadow: Growing up Lesbian in Nigeria using the Queer
theory. The study finds that, Unoma Azuah’s portrayal of queer characters
in her memoir and Unoma’s several attempts at asserting her queerness as
a personal identity is consistent with ongoing agitation for LGBTQ rights.
It argues that Azuah’s narrative is contextualised within a social space with
structures that challenge queer as an emerging norm of being. The paper
has therefore argued that Nigeria’s queer literature and the possibility of
queer’s search for selfhood and domesticity in Nigeria is characterised
by taboos and limits that attest to the complexity of the society and its
espoused sexual norms.