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 platforms such as 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. This allows the content creators to assert their unruly presence on these social media spaces. This book provides an in-depth analysis of how digital visual cultures function as archives, sites of protest, and spaces of worldmaking for gender and sexual minorities who are often excluded from official national narratives and public discourse. Rejecting colonial epistemic frameworks, the authors advance a decolonial queer and trans project which foregrounds fluidity, embodiment, and diasporic interconnection. This book represents an important intervention in African queer studies and digital media scholarship. It highlights both the transformative power and precarity of online queer and trans lives in repressive, unaccommodating and unequal contexts.