CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Tucker, Heather |
|---|---|
| Title | The Courageous Sisters, Erotic Subjectivity, and the Maneuvering of NGO Frictions in Accra, Ghana |
| Summary | This dissertation is an ethnographic study of what I refer to as a group of working-class queer women and their uneasy relationship with transnationally funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Taking a queer, post-colonial perspective on transnational governmentality of bodies and sexuality, the research shows the friction between working-class queer women and NGO spaces in this regard. Firstly, this dissertation focuses on the disconnect between NGOs that purport to work with sexual minorities and their inability to connect with ‘lesbians,’ including those queer women who attend NGO events, and focuses on how technologies of recognition and confession are carried through NGO spaces, as a form of neoliberal transnational governmentality. In this vein, this work examines the ways in which certain cis-gender male dominated NGOs in Accra have come to be historically reliant on northern donor (public health) funding through HIV interventions, and how these NGOs rely on individuals to “come out” to participate in NGO services through categories of risk. Following this, the dissertation explores the more recent interest of these NGOs to include of all of those under the “LGBT umbrella,” including ‘lesbians,’ in their work. This dissertation specifically focuses on participant observation with a core group of queer women, who maneuvered through increasingly professionalized NGO spaces that sought to include them in their work. Through a focus on lived realities and participation in NGOs, this dissertation shows how this group came to embody the friction between supposedly ‘local’ norms regarding sexuality in the post-colonial Ghana context, and transnational forces, while staying true to their desires although they were often labeled as the product of ‘foreign’ influences. Through accounts of time spent in homes, bars, NGO spaces and trainings, and on the social media application, WhatsApp, I show how a nyaanyo (the Ga term for friend) counter public was created by these individuals as a space of their own, through which a complexity and multiplicity of desire and experience was articulated. Eventually, I show how the “Courageous Sisters” NGO was formed as an NGO based on the nyaanyo counter public formed in WhatsApp, a case which highlighted the multifariousness of contextualizing queer women’s experiences while also showing the importance of digital communities for expressing embodied realities, creating counter public discourses, forming belonging, and maneuvering a context in which working-class queer women were seen as victims in need of intervention by NGO’s. |
| Supervisor | Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/tucker_heather.pdf |
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