Southern African Queer and Trans Narratives in Digital Landscapes

Focusing on Southern African perspectives, this groundbreaking book explores how digital spaces offer alternative avenues for queer and trans visual cultures in Africa as manifested and shared through popular social media platforms. In its analysis of the dynamic intersection of queerness/transness, African identities, and social media, this book sheds light on the complexities, challenges and transformative potential of these emerging digital platforms and cultures. Through close textual and semiotic readings of content on sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), the authors demonstrate how queer and trans content creators harness visuality, performance and algorithmic visibility to challenge heteronormative scripts and narratives of gender and sexuality. Providing an in-depth analysis of how visual cultures function as archives, sites of protest, and spaces of worldmaking for gender and sexual minorities, this book rejects colonial epistemic frameworks to advance a decolonial queer and trans project which foregrounds fluidity, embodiment and diasporic interconnection. The authors explore this important intervention in African queer studies and digital media scholarship, highlighting both the transformative power and precarity of online queer and trans lives in repressive, unaccommodating and unequal contexts.