[Commlist] Call for Chapters: Queer Digital Citizenship in Africa: spaces of agency and resistance

Call for Chapters:
Queer Digital Citizenship in Africa: spaces of agency and resistance

Edited by Tanja Bosch, Nyx Mclean and Tony Roberts

Bloomsbury Academic, Digital Africa Series

We invite scholars, activists, and practitioners to contribute to an 
edited volume on Queer Digital Citizenship in Africa. Following the 
publications of /Digital Citizenship in Africa/ (2023) and /Feminist 
Digital Citizenship in Africa/ (2025), this book continues the 
exploration of digital rights, identities, and activism on the 
continent. This volume aims to explore how queer individuals and 
communities across the African continent engage with, resist, and 
reshape digital spaces to assert their citizenship, visibility, and 
rights. It seeks to challenge dominant narratives of queer exclusion and 
victimhood, by focusing on agency, activism, and community-building in 
online environments.

As Volpp (2017) argues, queer citizenship must be understood beyond 
formal legal rights, incorporating the lived realities of LGBTQI+ 
individuals who navigate exclusionary state structures while forging 
alternative spaces for belonging. In the African context, online 
platforms serve as vital arenas for such negotiations, where queerness 
is both contested and reimagined.**Digital spaces have thus become 
critical for LGBTQI+ communities, offering platforms for advocacy, 
resistance, identity formation, and cultural production. This book will 
explore why queer Africans are using digital spaces to perform 
citizenship; what (dis)advantages digital spaces afford; and what 
(dis)benefits have been experienced. What can be done in online spaces 
that cannot be done in offline spaces in different countries across the 
continent?McLean and Mugo (2015) note that digital platforms enable 
queer African women to express their lived experiences, challenge 
dominant narratives, and establish counter-publics that redefine their 
social and political realities. Keeling (2014) further conceptualizes 
digital platforms as facilitating queer operating systems (Queer OS) 
that enable imaginative, unexpected, and ethical relations, thus 
transforming the social and political dynamics of queer communities.**

While mainstream discourses often portray queer Africans as victims of 
oppression, digital environments provide avenues for 
self-representation, organizing, and community-building beyond 
state-sanctioned boundaries. However, these digital spaces are also 
sites of regulation, surveillance, and cyber violence, reflecting the 
broader contestations around queer citizenship. McLean and Mugo (2015) 
emphasize that despite the empowering potential of digital spaces, these 
platforms also become arenas where marginalized identities must 
negotiate increased visibility with the risks of surveillance and 
digital policing.**Reddy, Monro, and Matebeni (2018) highlight how queer 
African activism is deeply embedded in both local and transnational 
struggles, challenging dominant state and societal structures while 
engaging with global discourses on LGBTQI+ rights.

Moving between the local and the transnational, queerness in Africa 
moves beyond extended categories of gender and sexuality towards a 
holistic citizenship that subverts hegemony and power (Nyanzi 2014; 
Matebeni 2017;). This subversion has afforded African LGBTQI+ new 
opportunities of ‘queering’ the digital space. This volume builds on 
interdisciplinary perspectives to interrogate how digital technologies 
facilitate or hinder queer belonging, activism, and cultural expression 
across African contexts. It aims to provide new insights into the 
intersections of gender, sexuality, technology, and citizenship in the 
African digital landscape.

We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines and methodological 
approaches, including but not limited to the below, and we encourage 
chapters that provide diverse case studies of queer digital citizenship:

  * Digital Activism and Advocacy: How do queer Africans use digital
    platforms for advocacy, policy change, and resistance? What are the
    risks and rewards of online organizing?
  * Social Media and Queer Visibility: How do platforms like TikTok,
    Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram shape queer self-representation,
    discourse, and community formation in African contexts?
  * Queer Digital Counter-publics: How do African queer individuals
    create alternative digital publics that resist mainstream homophobic
    and transphobic narratives? How do African queer individuals use
    coding, encryption, and other digital strategies for subversive
    digital practices?
  * Online Surveillance and Digital Policing: How do African states and
    societies regulate and control queer digital spaces? What strategies
    do queer users employ to navigate censorship, cyber harassment, and
    surveillance? **
  * Queer Archives and Digital Memory: How are African LGBTQI+ histories
    being documented and archived online? What tensions arise between
    digital preservation and the risks of hypervisibility? **
  * Intersectionality and Digital Citizenship: How do race, class,
    gender identity, and disability intersect with queer digital
    experiences in African contexts?
  * Queer Diasporas and Digital Connectivity: How do African queer
    diasporas engage with home communities through digital platforms?
  * Popular Culture and Queer African Expressions Online: How do digital
    cultural productions—music, dance, art, memes—contribute to the
    articulation of queer African identities?
  * Queer Play, Creativity, and Virtual Realities: How do African queer
    individuals use digital art and creativity, gaming, and virtual
    reality to imagine and inhabit joyful, affirming worlds? What role
    does digital playfulness have in fostering queer joy and
    self-expression?

  * Queer Digital Intimacies and Relationships: How do digital
    technologies shape queer dating, relationships, and sexual cultures
    in African contexts? Inclusive of the negotiation of safety and
    desire in digital spaces. What are the creative ways of signalling
    queerness online while maintaining safety?
  * Digital Economies and Queer Livelihoods: How do African queer
    individuals engage in digital economies for survival? Inclusive of
    gig work, crowdfunding and other forms of online labour that offer
    economic agency in contexts of discrimination.
*Submission Guidelines *

We invite extended abstracts of +/-800 words that outline the chapter’s 
argument, methodology, and relevance to the volume’s theme. Please 
include a reference list, and a short biography (150 words) with your 
submission.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2025

Submissions should be sent to (tanja.bosch /at/ uct.ac.za) 
<mailto:(tanja.bosch /at/ uct.ac.za)> with the subject line “Queer Digital 
Citizenship in Africa – Chapter Proposal.”

No payment is required from authors.

**

*References*

Keeling, K. (2014). Queer OS. Cinema Journal, 53(2), 152–157.

Matebeni, Z. (2017). Southern perspectives on gender relations and 
sexualities: A queer intervention. /Revista de Antropologia, 60/(3), 26-44.

McLean, N., & Mugo, T.K. (2015). The Digital Age: A Feminist Future for 
the Queer African Woman. IDS Bulletin, 46(4), 97–100.

Nyanzi, S. (2014). Queering Queer Africa. In Matebeni, Z. (Ed.), 
Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities 
(pp. 65-70). Athlone, Cape Town: Modjaji Books.

Reddy, V., Monro, S., and Matebeni, Z. Introduction. In Queer in Africa: 
LGBTI Identities, Citizenship and Activism.

Volpp, L. (2017). Chapter 8. Feminist, Sexual and Queer Citizenship. In 
The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship. Oxford University Press, UK.


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