Best Published Scholarly Essays 2023

QASA is delighted to announce the winners of our essay prizes for this year! The QASA essay prizes reward critical interventions, exceptional writing, accomplished research, and expansions to the scope of the field, across disciplines. The prizes are aimed to highlight the work of new scholars—those without tenure—in order to support and diversify the field as a whole. QASA gives a prize for the best scholarly published essay by a junior scholar, and a prize for the best scholarly published essay by a graduate student. 

The two co-winners of the Queer African Studies Association prize for best published essay by a junior scholar for 2023 are Efemia Chela, for “Dancing with Decolonial Praxis: LBQ Women and Non-Binary People’s Subcultures in Lusaka, Zambia” in Gender & Development, and Renugan Raidoo for “Politics of the Poisoned Belly: Figurations of Deviance and the Modernity of Homophobia in Urban Sierra Leone” in GLQ. Charlotte Grabli won Honorable Mention for “Elegant Incursions: Fashion, Music, and Gender Dissidence in 1950s Brazzaville and Kinshasa” in Journal of Women’s History. The winner of this year’s prize for best published essay by a graduate student was Nigel Timothy Mpemba Patel, for “A Queer Chinkhoswe: Re-Imagining the Customary in Malawi” in Criminal Legalities and Minorities in the Global South, eds. G.B. Radics and P. Ciocchini.

This year’s essays explore a range of locations that have not yet received a great deal of critical attention in the field. Chela, Patel, and Raidoo’s essays include concise yet comprehensive reviews of the legal, historical and political terrain in regards to same-sex sexuality and gender diversity in each of their countries of focus; Chela and Raidoo also highlight recent forms of activism. Chela’s essay, which may be the first published research on LGB women and nonbinary people in Zambia, offers an engagingly written account of clandestine “queer world-making parties” and private online counterpublics, through a small but rich archive of interviews. She highlights the forms of interpersonal surveillance “LBQ women” deal with, as opposed to the threats from law enforcement faced by gay men and transgender women: but her emphasis is on queer joy and ingenuity. Raidoo acutely analyzes the contemporary emergence of discourses of homophobia in Sierra Leone, where the state has remained relatively silent on the issue, through an anthropological lens—or as he compellingly phrases it, “the cultural forces that make queer bodies convincing characters in the most dystopian dramas about the future.” He uses work on witchcraft and modernity in Africa to explore how “sexual deviance in the body of the gay man” becomes a figure for conflicts over sovereignty and corruption in postcolonial neoliberalism. Grabli’s essay, itself an elegant incursion, offers a fascinating account of urban women’s associations in the Congo in the 1950s, through which women worked together to gain independence, respect, and livelihoods in the worlds of fashion, music, and broadcasting. The essay is an exemplary model of how to combine women’s history and feminist analysis with an attention to the presence of transgender women. Patel takes up the much-publicized 2009 prosecution of Tiwonge Chimbalanga Kachepa and Steven Monjeza Soko following their traditional marriage ceremony, or chinkhoswe, which was interpreted as a “gay marriage” even though Tiwonge identifies as a woman and was accepted as such in her community. Patel argues for a “queer jurisprudence” informed by the flexibility of “living customary law”—as opposed to either the postcolonial legal system or “official customary law.”  In this framework, the practice of tradition becomes a space for people like Tiwonge to forge different futures.

The QASA essay prizes reward critical interventions, exceptional writing, accomplished research, and expansions to the scope of the field, across disciplines. The prizes are aimed to highlight the work of new scholars—those without tenure—in order to support and diversify the field as a whole.