Same-Sex Sexuality in Africa: A Case Study from Senegal

Abstract:

This case study from Dakar, Senegal, suggests that gender and sexual identities in Africa reveal more diversity than typically suggested in the literature on sexuality and AIDS in Africa. Furthermore, this flexibility indicates a greater variety of sexual behaviors than the extensive prior work on heterosexual transmission of HIV suggests. Secrecy is a key to understanding the variation; much diversity is not obvious because it is kept from public scrutiny. Long-term ethnographic investigations of sexual identities and behavior are invaluable to discovering and interpreting this diversity in African societies.

Keywords: Africa; Senegal; homosexuality; HIV; secrecy; stigmatization

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: Department of Anthropology/Program of Human Sexuality, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California; nielsft@sfsu.edu