Introduction
Sutura (discretion, modesty) is a central element in Senegalese Wolof culture that, among other things, promotes feminine honour through chastity, silence with regard to discussing sexuality with elders, and refraining from articulating same-sex desires in general. Consequently, sutura is seen as limiting the space for non-normative sexualities. However, women who call themselves lesbienne in Senegal strategically employ sutura to enable same-sex intimacies, whereby they resist the normative framework that tries to limit their expressions. This paradox of the way in which sutura and queerness co-produce and reinforce one another is central to this article. I demonstrate how young women strategically employ the normative framework of sutura to create spaces for their same-sex intimacies. They simultaneously provide an alternative to the frontiers of international sexual rights activism and to its ostensibly antithetical Islamic social code. By examining how young women discreetly navigate existing spaces and create alternative spaces in trying to secure decent lives for themselves, this article shows how reconfigurations of urban and family spaces potentially offer new directions for queer theorizing.
In a critical reflection on queer anthropology, Lewin critiques the way in which queer is often understood as ‘visible, intentional, and effective subversions of mainstream cultural norms and the related expectation that explicit and palpable transgression is the only sort of queerness worthy of the name’ (Lewin Reference Lewin2016: 604). Her critique points at a schism between much global sexual rights activism and the everyday lives of lesbiennes in Senegal, whose queer expressions remain largely invisible to outsiders. To understand how queerness can take shape precisely through norms, we have to examine the crucial role of sutura in guiding the lives of lesbiennes in Senegal. Sutura is a form of silence that does not straightforwardly render impossible expressions and discussions of (non-normative) sexualities. It is therefore important to explore how sutura, as a form and virtue of silence, enables a queering of one's environment. This article demonstrates how sutura rather than outright resistance characterizes queer Senegal, resolving the paradox between sutura and non-normative sexualities. By employing sutura, lesbiennes simultaneously confirm and defy gender and sexual normativity. This juxtaposition of queer with sutura calls for a nuanced notion of dissent. Following Boone et al. (Reference Boone, Dupuis, Meeker, Quimby, Sarver, Silverman and Weatherston2000), who argue against the ‘freezing’ of queer knowledge and movements, the queer potential of sutura lies in its volatility.
The empirical material I present stems from fieldwork conducted between August 2017 and January 2018 in urban Senegal, most notably Dakar, on the ways in which young lesbiennes navigated societal expectations of heteronormativity and personal same-sex desires. I initially entered the milieu of lesbiennes by joining a Dakarois football team, through which I was introduced to other lesbiennes and queer(ed) spaces. Women in the study were aged between twenty and thirty-three years old, and all but one were unmarried at the time of the research. Most women lived with their families in one of the crowded popular neighbourhoods or banlieues of the city. Living with family until marriage is both the norm and an inescapable reality for these women from poor socio-economic backgrounds. Those who did live apart from their families, with (girl)friends, often struggled to survive due to the practically absent renumeration in women's football and the difficulty in securing jobs, regardless of their level of education. Of my interlocutors, all but one used the French lesbienne to describe themselves. This was often accompanied by ‘je vis ça’ (I live that). The emphasis on practice points to the discrepancy in understandings of sexuality between Senegal (and many other regions in the world) and the West. Terms circulate globally via human rights discourse and media, yet they hold different meanings for different people. Therefore, the Senegalese lesbienne cannot be equated to the English ‘lesbian’ or ‘lesbian woman’. Throughout the article, I employ the terms used by my interlocutors to describe their experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality. The mix of Wolof, French, English and street patois reveals the ways in which they queer and query their urban environment. I employ the term ‘queer’ when referring more broadly to the ‘field of non-normative genders … desires and practices’ (Spronk and Nyeck Reference Spronk and Nyeck2021), and in the theoretical sense when exploring how my interlocutors queer Senegal when balancing gender and sexual dissidence, societal expectations and family life.
A Senegalese sexual imaginary
To understand how women negotiate room for queer expressions, it is important to understand how sexuality is constructed in Senegal. In the West, sexuality has become a prime marker of one's social identity (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1990 [1976]), but in other parts of the world, including in Africa, sexuality is often understood as something one does rather than what one is (Spronk Reference Spronk2018; Wekker Reference Wekker2006). In Senegal, an ‘Islamised gender ideology’ (Gueye Reference Gueye and Oyewùmí2011: 69), ‘naturalises, sacralises and consequently institutionalises heterosexuality and its concomitant understandings of gender and gender roles as “just the way it is”’ (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2017: 24). Marriage and parenthood, rather than sexual desires or orientations, are regarded as central elements of people's social identities. Marriage is the only socially accepted union from which families can be built, and women in particular face societal pressure to get married. The ideal Senegalese woman, furthermore, is a modest woman who dresses appropriately (i.e. properly covering the body) and who avoids spending unnecessary time in public spaces (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2017). Submission to male authority, and particularly a wife's submission to her husband, is constitutive of sutura. A woman who breaks with these norms arguably breaks with legible womanhood. As much as women are judged for not complying with these norms, women negotiate and interpret their sexual relations in various ways to uphold their status as jigéen ju baax (a good woman). The question is not whether women can reconcile their Islamic faith with their same-sex relationships, but rather how they navigate the religiously informed discourse on gender and sexuality – the Senegalese sexual imaginary Gilbert (ibid.: 24) – to maintain the image of a good Muslim woman. One way in which lesbiennes navigate this sexual imaginary is through a tactical use of sutura.
A core concept in the Wolof code of honour, sutura connotes ‘discretion, modesty, privacy, protection, and the happiness that the previous terms are said to ensure’ (Mills Reference Mills2011: 2–3). More than just happiness, it functions ‘as the fragile membrane between life and death, and therefore between communal inclusion and exclusion’ (ibid.: 5). It has come to be understood as a Muslim value and thus is shared by other ethnic groups in Senegal. Sutura signifies both an attribute you have and something you do: you can give someone else sutura by hiding their misbehaviour, and you can show your sutura by avoiding certain practices, such as discussing sexuality with elders or discussing same-sex practices in general (ibid.). Sutura is regarded as the foundation of feminine honour, and there is more at stake when it is breached by a woman than when it is breached by a man. It is, therefore, a gendered virtue, and it is constitutive of sexual normativity. It is an ideology that prescribes certain attitudes, language and appearances that are deemed appropriate. At the same time, sutura can be drawn upon strategically. Among themselves, young women are fairly direct, and discretion is thus not a static cultural given of Senegalese society. Rather, it is a skill that is transmitted and continuously learned and reworked to navigate through life successfully and to live a morally acceptable life. Not respecting the value of sutura leads to shame – for yourself as well as for your family.
According to Wolof morality, however, shame is declared only upon public exposure, and a bad deed that is not visible to others does not lead to dishonour (Mills Reference Mills2011). Through careful adherence to the value of sutura, non-normative practices can be effectively masked and public shame can be prevented. Such masking is not reserved for same-sex intimacies alone. Van Eerdewijk (Reference Van Eerdewijk2007) has studied young, unmarried women's and men's sexual practices in Dakar, showing how women find various ways to engage in sexual practices without compromising their virginity. Because virginity is narrowly defined as protecting the hymen by not engaging in vaginal penetration, couples may practise oral sex, anal sex and manual stimulation to pleasure themselves and their partners without breaking the norm. When women do lose their virginity before marriage, they may seek to hide premarital sexual conduct by ostensibly restoring their virginity through hymenoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the hymen, or, as a much cheaper option, through the use of serre vagin (vagina tighteners) with billes de karité (shea butter pebbles) inserted into the vagina or savons de virginité (virginity soaps); these tighten the vagina so that the woman appears to be a virgin (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2017: 173–5). Lesbiennes have their own ways of masking dissident practices in order to maintain their status as good women, to which I turn shortly.
Although today's Senegalese sexual imaginary reflects heteropatriarchal structures, gender and sexual dissidence have historically had a place in Senegalese society through the figure of the góor-jigéen (literally ‘man-woman’). Góor-jigéen have existed at least since the late nineteenth century, and during the twentieth century they occupied feminine ceremonial roles during marriages and baptisms (Broqua Reference Broqua2017). Their social status was comparable to that of griots (Gning Reference Gning2013: 78). Today, the term is a derogatory synonym for the idea of the male homosexual and its gender significance has been erased (Broqua Reference Broqua2017). Coly (Reference Coly, M'Baye and Muhonja2019) argues that 2008 marked a turning point in this regard, when the Senegalese tabloid Icône published photographs of an alleged gay marriage,Footnote 1 instigating a witch-hunt against gender non-confirming men. Before 2008, she argues, ‘there were discursively no homosexuals and gays in Senegal’ (ibid.: 34). Since then, numerous ‘scandals’ about the immoral behaviour of women and queer persons (both male- and female-bodied) have featured in the media, causing strong moral reactions from society, including from Islamic organizations that warn of the moral decay of Senegalese society (Diop Reference Diop2012). In fact, anything scandalous is perceived to be un-Senegalese, and the West is perceived as promoting homosexuality, prostitution and sexual liberalism. At the same time, such mediatized scandals feed into a popular discourse of a uniformly homophobic Africa (see Awondo et al. Reference Awondo, Geschiere and Reid2013). Recently, lesbiennes have increasingly become the target of mediatized scandals too. In April 2019, a video of two high-school girls kissing went viral,Footnote 2 and the Islamic NGO Jamra accused Sourire de Femme, the country's only official organization for queer women, of promoting lesbianism in the country. Because homophobia is often deployed as a political strategy (Coly Reference Coly, M'Baye and Muhonja2019; see Nyeck Reference Nyeck, Nyeck and Epprecht2013 on Cameroon), such mediatized scandals go hand in hand with mundane queer lives that, for the large majority, escape public attention.
Research on same-sex sexuality in Senegal has thus far explored men who have sex with men in the context of HIV and AIDS research and prevention and treatment strategies (see Niang et al. Reference Niang, Tapsoba, Weiss, Diagne, Niang, Mody Moreau, Gomis, Sidibé Wade, Seck and Castle2003; Teunis Reference Teunis1996; Reference Teunis2000), or góor-jigéen in cultural-historical accounts of gender and sexual dissidence (Broqua Reference Broqua2017; Niang et al. Reference Niang, Tapsoba, Weiss, Diagne, Niang, Mody Moreau, Gomis, Sidibé Wade, Seck and Castle2003). This article seeks to contribute to this body of literature by exploring how queerness permeates everyday life for young women. In an essay ‘Queering queer Africa’, Stella Nyanzi argues for the need to move beyond the global, anglophone-oriented LGBT+ discourse to recognize how queer erotic desires and gendered subjectivities are embedded in people's diverse engagements in everyday life (Nyanzi Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014: 63). The aim of this article is to examine such everyday realities and to explore how young lesbiennes in Senegal may help us theorize queer from the vicissitudes of their lives.
Kooba: urban queer know-how
Fama (aged twenty-three in 2018) and her older sister had exchanged their village on Senegal's west coast for Dakar in 2013. Having had only a couple of years of schooling, Fama sought work opportunities in informal trade. The two initially shared an apartment in one of the city's popular neighbourhoods, but when her sister got married, Fama decided it was time to ‘me débarrasser de ma soeur … parce qu'elle ne connaît pas cette vie [get rid of my sister … because she does not know this life]’.Footnote 3 She found a room elsewhere that she has since shared with a friend. When we first met, she had assured me ‘je ne vis pas la vie lesbienne [I do not live the lesbian life]’.Footnote 4 However, when I met her again just before my return to Europe, she again articulated the wish to visit me and marry a woman in the Netherlands. She said that she would miss Senegal considerably though. When I asked her what she would miss the most about her life in Senegal, she said, decidedly, ‘les fréquentations des kooba [the meetings of the kooba]’. She referred to her daily gathering of lesbienne and gay Footnote 5 friends in her room around midnight. Fama's kooba friends are not just gay or lesbienne, they are those who frequent bars and nightclubs. Kooba refers to the knowledge and know-how of human relations that are acquired in this nightlife.Footnote 6 Kooba is the Wolof word for horse antelope; an image of the animal featured on the Senegalese beer brand Kooba, which was popular in the 1960s. Kooba became a code name for all those who frequented bars where the beer was sold. This included sex workers, thieves (voleurs), bandits (agresseurs), and lesbiennes and gays. Kooba beer is no longer in production in Senegal, but the word remains popular among sex workers, gays and lesbiennes as a way to speak discreetly, and proudly, about this network of relationships. Their presence in this nightlife sets them apart from others who lack the knowledge and know-how that are acquired here.
Kooba is closely associated with the more widely used word nàndite (comprehension), because both terms refer to the comprehension or understanding of something that the general public does not understand. Prothmann (Reference Prothmann, Ammann and Förster2018: 265) defined nàndite as ‘an urban citizen capable of projecting an image of success’. It is reminiscent of connected (branché) queer men in urban Democratic Republic of Congo (Hendriks Reference Hendriks2016). Today, gays and lesbiennes in Senegal use this word without necessarily being aware of its history. Among lesbienne and gay youth, the word may have gained popularity in the past few years because of Wally Seck's song ‘Kooba yi’. Wally Seck is a very popular Senegalese artist, and he is particularly popular among young lesbiennes and gays. Before a live version of the song, he explained the word kooba to his audience as follows: ‘Mba xam ngeen lan la mooy kooba? Kooba mooy nàndite, ku xam lépp [I hope you know what kooba means? Kooba means nàndite, the one who knows everything].’Footnote 7 Fama had no idea of the history behind the word kooba, but as someone immersed in Dakarois nightlife, and as a big fan of Wally Seck, she proudly calls herself and her friends kooba.
These friends regularly gather at Fama's place, a room on the ground floor of a three-storey apartment building. The tenants – a mix of single men, young married couples and small families – share toilets and showers in the courtyard opposite Fama's room and an open kitchen on the rooftop. Fama consciously invites her friends late at night to avoid drawing attention from the other tenants who hang around the courtyard during the day, passing by her room to take the stairs to the upper floors of the building. She nevertheless takes joy in inviting kooba friends to her place on a daily basis. Taking into account the Senegalese sexual imaginary and the stress this may bring for young lesbiennes and gays who feel constrained by heteronormative expectations to marry, Fama's words may sound strange. However, for Fama and many others, it is the extensive network of relationships that lesbiennes and gays maintain that makes Senegal the country they love and that they would miss should they move abroad – a dream that, for various reasons, many people have. Fama's choice of the French word fréquentations is interesting, because it denotes ‘meeting’ or ‘gathering’ as well as ‘dating’. Its dual meaning points to the ambiguity and fluidity in friendships, erotic practices and romantic relationships. This indeterminacy is what makes Fama and her kooba friends frontier Africans. For Nyamnjoh, this conviviality allows people to ‘straddle myriad identity margins and constantly seek to bridge various divides in the interest of the imperatives of living interconnections, nuances and complexities’ (Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 258).
The knowledge and know-how that kooba possess relate to the network of relationships and erotic practices that are conceived in this nightlife, but which are handled with sutura in other places. The inclusion of thieves and gangs in this network of kooba points to another element of this know-how: its relation to lijjanti (hustling). Lijjanti refers to acquiring the means necessary to fulfil personal and social demands through a certain cleverness in using one's social network. Fama's kooba friends form this network, from which she draws the necessary financial means by selling them clothing or cosmetics and by maintaining relationships with those who sometimes pay for her at parties, or pay for other personal demands. The relevance of kooba networks and know-how for Fama reveals how normative frameworks, queer desires and economic struggles coalesce in the lives of many young urbanites. By navigating these simultaneous desires, lesbiennes such as Fama are pioneer agents in the queering of knowledge from Africa.
Queering family life
Whereas Fama ‘got rid’ of her sister in order to live her queer desires more freely, finding in the queer night scene a new network that allows her to get by in the city, most unmarried women continue to live with their families. In these families, ‘the interdependence of the normal and the perverse … can be masked by an emphasis on secrecy and modesty’ (Pierce Reference Pierce2007: 551). Secrecy with regard to same-sex intimacies not only distinguishes those who know from those who do not know; also, ‘a secret can bind together those who share it, and it can mask immoral conduct’ (ibid.: 552). It creates ‘communities of secrecy’ (Hardon and Posel Reference Hardon and Posel2012: S4) where lesbiennes share a knowledge of desires and practices that remain otherwise unspoken. Various scholars have pointed to this significance of secrecy or discretion for understanding sexualities in Africa (Dankwa Reference Dankwa2009; Gaudio Reference Gaudio2009; Gunkel Reference Gunkel2009; Pierce Reference Pierce2007). In Senegal, having sutura is about ensuring that particular articulations of same-sex desires and practices remain invisible to outsiders, those not in the know.
The normalcy of homosociality in Senegal provides room for the exploration of same-sex desires. Various studies on homosocial environments have shown how intimate friendships may include various degrees of erotic practices (Gunkel Reference Gunkel2009; Kendall Reference Kendall, Murray and Roscoe1998; Spronk Reference Spronk2018). When Lafia (aged twenty-three in 2017) described how she first explored same-sex intimacies with a girl, she said:
C’était en 2009 avec ma cousine. On partageait la chambre à l’époque. On faisait tout ensemble, on était tellement proche … un jour, elle m'a embrassée et elle a commencé à me caresser. Je l'ai aimée, et c'est comme ça que j'ai couché avec elle.Footnote 8
That was in 2009 with my cousin. We shared a room at that time. We did everything together; we were very close. One day, she kissed me and started caressing me. I liked it, so then it happened that I slept with her.
Mentioning that they ‘did everything together’ shows how explorations of eroticism can be part of the wide range of activities that close friends undertake. It triggered Lafia's desire for girls: ‘C'est là où j'ai découvert que j'aime les filles. J'aime jouer avec les filles [It was then that I learned that I liked girls. I love to play with girls].’ Lafia's experience with her cousin is not unique. Large extended families and small housing often result in multiple family members sharing bedrooms. Sharing beds may be an unavoidable reality, but the normalcy also means that having a (girl)friend over does not immediately raise eyebrows. When someone receives a visitor, rooms will often be rearranged so that the visitor sleeps alone or, if they are of the same sex, with his/her friend in one bedroom. Lafia explained how she would carefully time her girlfriend's visits for when her stepfather would not be around. Their house, situated in a quiet neighbourhood in a small town not far from Dakar, has three bedrooms: one for her mother and stepfather, one for her younger brother, and one that Lafia shares with her older sister and her sister's two-year-old son. Her stepfather divided his time equally between Lafia's mother and his first wife, and, when he was away, Lafia and her sister would sometimes keep their mother company at night. If Lafia wanted to invite her girlfriend over, she would suggest to her sister that she spend the night with their mother, arguing that she did not want her friend to be woken up early in the morning by her nephew.
Despite the space that family life may allow for some to explore same-sex intimacies, it is also the environment in which norms such as marriage can be imposed on women. When, in October 2017, I visited Hawa, a twenty-eight-year-old football player, football coach and tradeswoman, her mother jokingly called her garçonette. This self-invented word signified something like a female boy. Hawa said that whenever her father criticized her for wearing trousers, her mother would respond that he had prayed for a son when she was pregnant with Hawa. Her mother's attitude had completely changed by February 2018, when she was exerting pressure on Hawa to get married. Hawa spoke to me via WhatsApp:
La dernière fois quand tu étais chez moi, je suis sûre que tu n'avais pas remarqué, mais je ne parlais pas avec ma mère. Ça fait deux ou trois mois maintenant que je ne parle plus avec elle. Elle refuse … juste pour me mettre la pression.Footnote 9
The last time when you were here, I am sure you did not notice it, I did not talk to my mother. It has been two or three months now that I no longer talk to her. She refuses … just to exert pressure on me.
Her parents had decided to search for a husband for Hawa without her knowledge. One day, they introduced her to a potential husband, a man from the northern city of Saint-Louis, via telephone. She sent me a message in desperation after having fled the house, because the man would be visiting her that day. She was not yet sure how to handle the situation, but she assured me that the only option for her was to ‘fuir, fuir ma responsabilité … en tant que femme [escape, escape my responsibility … as a woman]’.Footnote 10 For Hawa, the pressure to get married conflicted too much with her personal desires. A few weeks later, she told me that she wanted to go to Morocco for a while. She had always dreamed of establishing her own trade internationally, and this was her chance to show her family that:
Je suis capable moi-même, sans être mariée ou sans être avec eux, de vivre ma vie … Mariée ou pas, je suis capable. Sans mari beaucoup plus en fait … pour leur montrer que le mariage n'est pas une obligation … pour devenir quelqu'une ou quelque chose demain.Footnote 11
I am capable by myself, without being married or without being with them [her family], to live my life … Married or not, I am capable. Without a husband much more in fact … to show them that marriage is not something compulsory … for me to become someone or something tomorrow.
Seeking economic independence and being independent from a man are rare in a culture where ‘marriage is a woman's security’ (Dial Reference Dial2008: 42). Economic security indeed seemed to be of primary concern to her parents. As Hawa tried to negotiate her journey to Morocco as an alternative to marriage at that moment, she decided it would be wise to tell them that there was someone who was willing to pay for her bus ticket to Morocco. When they believed that I would be supporting Hawa financially, they agreed to her travel. They had been aware of her plans to establish her own trade, and they trusted that she would work hard and would not become engaged in sex work or mbaraan (transactional sex). The black traces that the charcoal that she sold left on her skin and clothes every day served as a constant reminder of her hard work.
For other women, marriage may, in fact, increase their space for manoeuvre. When discussing marriage with Lafia, she remarked: ‘Quand je me marierai, je serai libre … Je serai deuxième femme, ça me donne plus de liberté [When I get married, I will be free … I will be second wife, that gives me more freedom].’Footnote 12 Marriage, in most cases, means moving out of your family's house to live with your husband's family or, if financial means allow for it, to construct your own household as a couple. For Lafia, moving out of her mother's house would probably increase her space for manoeuvre. She is currently strictly policed by her mother and her stepfather, who forbid her from going out much, especially at night. She has hopes that a family-in-law would not restrict her movement in the way her mother and stepfather currently do. Moreover, if she could secure herself a role as a second wife, or even a third or fourth, she might have a few nights a week to herself. Whenever her husband were with his other wife, this would allow Lafia to invite a girlfriend to stay over. In other words, conforming to the normative expectation of heterosexual marriage does not foreclose queerness.
Hawa's relationship with her ex-girlfriend Ramatoulaye confirms this. When Hawa described her previous relationships to me, she said that she had fond memories of her relationship with Ramatoulaye. There was a benefit to being with a married woman such as Ramatoulaye. Married women are perceived to be ‘plus fidèle’ (more loyal) than other girls, because ‘elles n'ont même pas le temps de jouer avec toi [they do not even have the time to play with you]’.Footnote 13 Ramatoulaye, she said, ‘était très discrete, pas comme les autres filles qui s'en foutent, qui font du n'importe quoi [she was very discreet, unlike other girls who do not care, who do anything]’.Footnote 14 The fact that Ramatoulaye had to be discreet about her relationship with Hawa, managing it simultaneously with married life, protected Hawa as well. When I returned to Senegal in July 2018, I met Ramatoulaye and her new girlfriend in Ramatoulaye's room in her own family's house. She had returned there due to problems with her husband. She was seeking a divorce from her husband, who had found out about her relationship with this girlfriend via Ramatoulaye's jealous ex-girlfriend. He had started threatening the two with going to the police to report them as lesbians. To avoid creating a big scene with her husband and her in-laws, she had decided to move back in with her own family. Hawa had enjoyed the discretion of her relationship with Ramatoulaye, but had broken up with her because: ‘C’était dur de savoir que le soir, quand tu rentres chez toi, elle couche avec son mari … Et quand elle était enceinte, je ne pouvais plus … j'ai rompu avec elle [It was tough knowing that, when you return home in the evening, she will be sleeping with her husband … and when she was pregnant, I could not take it any more … I broke up with her].’ Ramatoulaye's relationship with her current girlfriend had been less discreet because an ex-girlfriend had exposed the two to Ramatoulaye's husband. Ramatoulaye consequently had to take great pains to avoid public shame. These different cases concerning marriage demonstrate that, while marriage, at some point, inevitably becomes a point of negotiation in women's lives, the choice to conform – or not – to this expectation does not in itself determine the (dis)continuation of queer lives. Women such as Ramatoulaye, Lafia and Hawa try to find their own ways of navigating their relationships with discretion, with differing degrees of success. The troubles Ramatoulaye encountered after her ex-girlfriend had denounced her to her husband reveal how communities of secrecy can break down under the collision of resentment about broken relationships and lingering societal expectations of marriage. Sutura is furthermore debated within communities of secrecy, and women can hold different ideas about what constitutes sutura and how this relates to upholding the image of being worthy Senegalese women.
Expanding queer space
In addition to queer expressions that unfold discreetly within the family sphere, or with a certain intelligence (kooba or nàndite) in the somewhat distinct realm of nightlife, women further queer and claim space in a domain that is socially constructed as a masculine activity: football. Women in football jerseys on their way to the field have to deal with disapproving looks and comments from family members, neighbours and passers-by about their choice to play football and to dress, predominantly, in a masculine fashion (Adjepong Reference Adjepong and Nyeck2019; Oudenhuijsen Reference Oudenhuijsen2018; Packer Reference Packer2019a). Some women are actively discouraged from playing football, their sports jerseys being torn apart by their family, by being forbidden from playing, or by being warned that football causes barrenness. Such discouragement or outright criticism goes hand in hand with a much more tacit knowledge of the existence of same-sex intimacies in women's football teams. As Dankwa (Reference Dankwa2011: 236–7) wrote, in West Africa ‘the female football arena amounts to a homosocial public space, a site for gender variance where young women's masculine styles and same-sex intimacies are tacitly tolerated’. How do negative perceptions and a tacit acknowledgement of women's football go hand in hand? To understand this, we must take a closer look at the way in which sutura is being employed in this milieu. Discussions between women about the necessary means of sutura demonstrate that there is neither consensus nor a singular successful approach to achieving acceptance. Occasional alarms in the media about the prevalence of lesbians in women's football attest to this.Footnote 15
Female masculinity in Senegal is captured in the term jump, a self-identification of young women who embody a certain masculinity. Hawa explained about the time when she started playing football in 2005:
Quand tu voyais quelqu'une qui était habillée en garçon, une fille habillée en garçon, on dirait que c'est une joueuse. C’était la carte d'identité des footballeuses.Footnote 16
When you saw someone dressed as a boy, a girl dressed as a boy, people would say she is a player. It was the identity card of footballers.
She argued that the abundance of jump in the women's football environment is not a matter of expressing true selves, but rather:
pour montrer aux autres lesbiennes cachées, qu'il y a une autre ici, et qui joue au football … Il y avait que les joueuses qui s'habillaient comme ça, avant.
To show other hidden lesbians, that there is another one here, and who plays football … only football players dressed this way before.
A visible appearance of gender dissidence nevertheless allows for discreet communication about its meanings and intentions. Communicating same-sex desires to other women through clothing, without explicitly saying it, complies with the value of sutura. A jump presentation of self is not only or always a way of making same-sex desires readable for other women. It also proposes gender nuances, arguing against the universalizing tendencies of the heteropatriarchy to construct one vision of womanhood and female beauty. Through their deliberate jump fashioning, football women ‘queery’ (Spronk and Nyeck Reference Spronk and Nyeck2021) their urban environment by questioning this normative expectation of womanhood that demands a feminine appearance and bodily comportment. Women are, however, not unanimous about the discretion of jump fashioning in a domain where women's participation already raises certain eyebrows.Footnote 17 For some, the visible gender dissidence that jump embody jeopardizes the tacit acknowledgement of women's football as an arena of queer expression, and of the growing status and presence of women in football worldwide (Oudenhuijsen Reference Oudenhuijsen2019).Footnote 18
Several associations actively promote women's football in Senegal, responding to the stigmatization that women encounter when pursuing football careers. Ladies’ TurnFootnote 19 is a non-profit organization that was established in 2009 by the then captain of the national women's team, Seyni Ndir Seck, Dakar-based Cameroonian sports journalist Gaëlle Yomi, and the American Jennifer Browning. With initial funding from corporate sponsors, Ladies’ Turn organized its first tournament in 2009.Footnote 20 The organization offers girls the opportunity to play football in their local communities by organizing tournaments on neighbourhood terrains in various cities across Senegal. It envisions gender equality by countering the idea that football is not for women, and by offering additional activities in leadership for girls. More informal efforts by players in the national women's competition,Footnote 21 with their slogan ‘Je suis football féminin’, serve to challenge the common assumption that football is not for women. Their efforts can be seen as reflecting the political potential of sport (Young and White Reference Young and White1995), where societal (gender) norms are transgressed in and through sport. Yet, there is more to say about these efforts than to state that these women transgress norms. In particular, ‘Je suis football féminin’ draws on sutura to garner respect for women's football. Yaye (aged twenty-six in 2018) is a law student, and although she stopped playing football at the age of thirteen at the request of her parents, she has been involved as the secretary general of one of the Dakarois women's football teams for a couple of years. She was reintroduced to football via her girlfriend. She is particularly committed to advancing the status of women's football in Senegal and she was one of the initiators of ‘Je suis football féminin’. Yaye's movement consisted of establishing a Facebook group to update (female) football players about their competition, as well as informing them about developments in women's football in Europe. She also used the hashtag #jesuisfootballféminin on social media to comment on concrete examples of the marginalization of women's football, such as when two players on one team broke a limb during one of the competition's games. Women's games regularly had to be played on badly maintained and uneven pitches. However, her goal is not just to promote women's football per se; she is also seeking to educate girls on how to behave properly on and off the football field, in order to gain more respect from others. She sighed:
Les filles ne connaissaient pas vie privée avant. Il est important qu'elles comprennent sutura et les bons comportements. Il y a des filles qui aiment marcher avec leur pantalon sous leurs fesses. Comment tu penses qu'on puisse te respecter alors? … J'essaie de leur apprendre la différence entre vie privée et vie publique.Footnote 22
The girls did not know what private life was before. It is important that they know sutura and proper behaviour. Some girls like to walk with their trousers below their buttocks. How can you expect someone to respect you then? … I try to teach them the difference between private life and public life.
She has tried to address such issues via a WhatsApp group that she created with the captains of all the women's teams. ‘Je leur propose de sensibiliser les filles sur certains de leurs comportements [I suggest that they raise awareness among the girls about some of their behaviour].’Footnote 23 Compared with three years ago, she has seen a change in the players’ appearances: ‘Elles s'habillent correctement maintenant. Toujours en style jump, mais correcte [They dress properly now. Still in jump style, but proper].’ Balancing masculine appearances and an active engagement in football with societal expectations of womanhood, in a quest to obtain approval from society to play, suggests that the agency of these women lies not only in the capacity for progressive change or increased individual freedom, but also in the capacity to endure, suffer and persist (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2001). Packer (Reference Packer, M'Baye and Muhonja2019b) argues that football women embrace the stigma they face because of their gender non-conformity, because it fits with their vision of Sufi resistance. Enduring stigma grants these women individual moral power and brings them closer to God, as they compare their own suffering with that of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of the Senegalese Murid brotherhood and a spiritual guide for many Senegalese (Babou Reference Babou2007). The capacity to endure is a highly valued character trait in Senegal, captured in the Wolof term muñ, which signifies patience and endurance, and ‘refers to silent and stoic female suffering in the face of hardship or challenges’ (Foley and Drame Reference Foley and Drame2013: 128). The ability of football players to display muñ and sutura may allow women to maintain their status as good women, despite their visible gender dissidence.
The behaviour and carefully stylized appearances that jump women embody on the football field must be understood as part of a game of gaining prominence in the queer milieu. Despite the fact that same-sex intimacies are navigated with discretion, there is a community of lesbiennes that has carved out spaces to ‘voice and practice their passions and desires’ (Dankwa Reference Dankwa2009: 193) beyond the view of a public that rejects their practices or perceived sexual orientation. This makes many jump kooba, in their quest to project an image of success while simultaneously maintaining an aura of secrecy around their network of relations. Furthermore, beyond the football field, many women negotiate status at night. Queer spaces are created at various clubs in the city and during more privately organized parties in rented apartments:
Certaines filles veulent juste être … tu sais … le buzz … elles veulent être connues et populaires dans le milieu. Elles peuvent même aller vers [nom de la chanteuse] pour lui donner 2,000 FCFA pour qu'elle te chante. Juste pour être connue. Les filles peuvent gaspiller leur argent comme ça, et après elles vont te demander de l'argent pour prendre un taxi pour rentrer chez elle.Footnote 24
Some girls just want to be … you know … the buzz … they want to be known and popular in the scene. They can even go up to [name of the artist] and give her 2,000 FCFA so she will sing for you. Just to be known. Girls can spend all their money like this, and then they will ask you for money for a taxi to get home.
The artist, whose name I omit, organizes a queer party every Friday night in a popular club in Dakar. The current location is far from other common clubbing areas; it was moved recently because outsiders had become aware of the queer presence. The party provides not just a space where sexual dissidence is tolerated – by the owner of the club and bartenders, and by others not in the know who may accompany a friend to the party – and celebrated. It is also a place where the night provides the space to display other behaviour that is disapproved of normally, particularly for women, such as drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Girls who spend all their money at the party practise a form of gâter (to spoil) and faire le show (to make a show) (Fouquet Reference Fouquet2011; Newell Reference Newell2012), through which they reinforce their community of practice (O'Mara Reference O'Mara, Nyeck and Epprecht2013) and differentiate themselves from others as ‘the buzz’.
Taking part in this community of practice of kooba, and being able to attend parties in new and fashionable outfits, is not obvious for women like Fama. When I visited her on a December afternoon, she was a bit restless. Her mother had been calling her throughout the day to ask her for money. Fama sends her mother 10,000 FCFA (about €15) monthly for her tontine.Footnote 25 When Fama's sister got married, her parents had asked Fama to return home as long as she remained unmarried. She refused – ‘Parce qu'il n'y a rien au village. Pas de travail, pas de liberté [Because there is nothing in the village. No work, no freedom].’Footnote 26 Raising the rent for the room she shares with her friend Maguette is a challenge, and as we discussed a way to collect the 10,000 FCFA to send to her mother, her landlord knocked on the door and asked her to come outside. When Fama returned to the room, she told me:
Le proprietaire m'a demandé le loyer pour ce mois. Je lui ai dit que j'attends la rentrée de Maguette. Elle est chez sa copine, et moi je n'ai pas l'argent pour le loyer de ce mois.
The landlord asked me for this month's rent. I told him that I am waiting for Maguette to return. She is at her girlfriend's place, and I do not have the money for this month's rent.
It is a continuous struggle for Fama to make a living in Dakar and simultaneously juggle the expectations of her family in the village. Thorsen (Reference Thorsen, Christiansen, Utas and Vigh2006) argues that the migration of youth to towns is a way simultaneously to pursue personal aspirations of earning money and being independent, and to fulfil the expectations of being a responsible senior who contributes to the household income. By sending her mother money on a monthly basis, Fama demonstrates her responsibility towards her family. She thereby accelerates the transition from childhood to adulthood, despite the fact that she remains unmarried. She has tried various jobs in the informal economy, the last of which was to sell clothes that she bought from a tailor to subsequently resell from her home. She would show the clothes she had on sale to anyone who visited her, and try to sell them. This is a common strategy employed by vendors, one ‘that depend[s] upon social networks, reciprocity and trust for sales’ (Scheld Reference Scheld2007: 241). Fama had recently sold a njaxas Footnote 27 to an acquaintance on credit, so she decided to call him to try to get her money, so that she could send it to her mother. When her mother called her for the third time in one hour, Fama promised her that she would send the money before sunset. To me, she said that she did not know yet where she would get the money, because the man who owed her money kept telling her ‘tomorrow, inshallah’Footnote 28 whenever she called him. So, Fama, too, had to tell her mother ‘tonight, inshallah’.
Fama would never tell her mother that she could not get the money. It is important for her to prove to her parents that she gets by in Dakar, and that her choice to stay there has been a responsible one. In demonstrating adult responsibility by sending home money instead of asking for support for her living expenses, she negotiates her freedom as an unmarried girl. This freedom is important to her and not attainable back home, where ‘meetings of the kooba’ could not be organized. Fama needs her network of kooba to simultaneously fulfil personal desires and family expectations. This proves the interdependency of queer desires, work, family and housing. And as discussions in the football setting reveal, the balance between these elements is constantly being negotiated within queer milieus.
Conclusion: pioneers of queer Senegal
The joy that Fama finds in her group of lesbiennes and gays proves that sutura is not a totalizing framework that represses dissidents. Rather than disabling queer expression, the gender and sexual normativity that constitutes the norm of sutura has been shown to provide room for queer lives to take shape alongside family life. Whether it is Lafia who invites her girlfriend to spend the night at her place, rearranging the division of beds, or Hawa and Ramatoulaye who maintained a relationship while Ramatoulaye was married, the diverse tactics of navigation demonstrated by my interlocutors that allow them to express same-sex desires trouble the assumed antagonism between religious, normative frameworks and gender and sexual dissidence. Ranging from a nightclub that turns into a queer space on Friday nights, to football players seeking to enhance the status of women's football in the country, and to women who negotiate various arrangements to rent rooms for themselves or with (girl)friends, lesbiennes employ sutura to queer their urban environment. This queering and querying sometimes leads to friction with family members and wider society, as well as being a topic of debate within queer communities, as discussions in the football milieu concerning jump styling show. The relations between queer, sutura, kooba and jump reveal complicated balancing acts between achieving and showing success, and maintaining silence. Such frictions between the sometimes contradictory practices of sutura, visible gender dissidence and portraying urban success are characteristic of the vicissitudes of life (Spronk and Nyeck Reference Spronk and Nyeck2021). Rather than proving the incompatibility of queer life with sutura, such tensions reflect the ability of queerness to puzzle (Nyeck Reference Nyeck2011).
Women's desires in the urban environment are multiple, and the combination of cosmopolitan aspirations with family bonds and same-sex relationships recalls Nyanzi's (Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014) plea for a queering of Africa beyond the domain of sexuality. Together with the task of ‘rethinking sexuality from Africa’ (Hendriks and Spronk Reference Hendriks and Spronk2017, emphasis in original), this requires taking seriously the diverse and ambiguous realities of lesbiennes in urban Senegal. These women embody the frontiers of queering scholarship from Africa through the ways in which they show how a religious notion like sutura paradoxically provides space for queer lives. Yet, there are limits, and it is not only an individual's capacity to maintain sutura that matters. Family pressure to marry and societal pressure to appear as a respectable woman have an impact on the room for manoeuvre in different stages of life. But rather than radically opposing gender and sexual normativity, an assumption that is dominant in much of Western queer theory (Hendriks Reference Hendriks2021), these women make use of normative frameworks in trying to secure decent lives. Their use of a mix of international and local vernaculars at the intersection of self-identification, practice and know-how makes these women pioneering agents who queery Senegal and our knowledge production.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank S. N. Nyeck, Rachel Spronk and the anonymous reviewers of Africa for their very insightful feedback on this article.
