Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana

Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men—known in local parlance as Sasso—residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye’s notion of “amphibious personhood,” Kwame Edwin Otu argues that Sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity, creating an identity that transcends the western binary of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously upends misconceptions purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBTQ+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with Sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC’s The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the “heart of homophobic darkness” in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

About the speaker: Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu is assistant professor of African Studies at Georgetown University. Professor Otu is a cultural anthropologist with varied interests, ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. Otu’s first book monograph is entitled, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022). The book is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as Sasso. 

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Hall, 1575 Tondorf Road, Washington, United States