Queer Childhood, Gender Panic and Homophobia in Unoma Azuah’s Blessed Body

This study examines queer childhood and how it throws up gender panic and homophobia in heteronormative societies in Unoma Azuah’s Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of Nigerian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. The paper notes that in some African societies where heterosexuality is regarded as the natural sexual preference, there is this obnoxious fixation that gender and sex are fixed phenomenon and that, gender depends on a biological sex and sexuality also depends on a prescribed gender. Thus, children who manifest non-conforming gender roles are seen as queer and this, expectedly, attracts cruel acts of homophobia by family members and even the community. Against this backdrop, this paper attempts a deconstruction of the belief that gender and sex are fixed. Through analysis of select stories in Azuah’s Blessed Body, the paper explores textual manifestation of queer childhoods as literary modes of interrogating a restrictive cultural and social contexts. Using Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, which lies within queer theory, this paper establishes that being a woman or man is a matter of cultural compulsion and not necessarily from sex. The paper concludes that the society’s insistence on compulsory stability of sex, gender and desire is nothing but heteronormative conspiracy to perpetually demonise and persecute those with alternative sexual preference.

Keywords: Childhood Queer Sex-Gender Panic Homophobia Sexuality

Author

• Kufre A. Akpan
  Department of English, Akwa Ibom State University
  Obio Akpa Campus, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria
  Email: kufisco@yahoo.com
  07069676843