During the past two decades, the study of sexuality and gender in music has become a decidedly mainstream activity. To be sure, music has long been obviously and intimately involved in matters pertaining to relations, both sexual and otherwise, between and amongst the sexes. Its use in courtship is the one that perhaps first comes to mind, this use being probably as old as music itself. This book contains all the papers presented at the conference by the same name.

Honorable Mention, 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2014 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Section on Sexualities of the American Sociological Association Winner of the 2013 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies presented by the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies Sex in Transition explores the lives of those who undermine the man/woman binary, exposing the gendered contradictions of apartheid and the transition to democracy in South Africa. In this context, gender liminality—a way to describe spaces between common conceptions of "man" and "woman"—is expressed by South Africans who identify as transgender, transsexual, transvestite, intersex, lesbian, gay, and/or eschew these categories altogether. This book is the first academic exploration of challenges to the man/woman binary on the African continent and brings together gender, queer, and postcolonial studies to question the stability of sex. It examines issues including why transsexuals' sex transitions were encouraged under apartheid and illegal during the political transition to democracy and how butch lesbians and drag queens in urban townships reshape race and gender. Sex in Transition challenges the dominance of theoretical frameworks based in the global North, drawing on fifteen years of research in South Africa to define the parameters of a new transnational transgender and sexuality studies.

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them. Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Reclaiming Afrikan: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities is a collaboration and collection of art, photography and critical essays interrogating the meanings and everyday practices of queer life in Africa today. In Reclaiming Afrikan authors, activists and artists from Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa offer fresh perspectives on queer life; how gender and sexuality can be understood in Africa as ways of reclaiming identities in the continent. Africa is known to be harsh towards people with non-conforming genders and sexual identities. It is within this framework that Reclaiming Afrikan exists to respond to such violations and to offer alternative ways of thinking and being in the continent. The book appropriates 'Afrika' and 'queer' to affirm sexual identities that are ordinarily shamed and violated by prejudice and hatred. The use of 'k' in Afrika signals an appropriation of an identity and belonging that is always detached from a 'queer' person. 'queer' in this book is understood as an inquiry into the present, as a critical space that pushes the boundaries of what is embraced as normative. The artists and authors included in this text are 'queer' themselves and occupy spaces that speak back to hegemony. For many, this position challenges various norms on gender, sexuality, and existence and offers a subversive way of being.

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state’s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

How does one address homophobia without threatening majority rule democracy and freedoms of speech and faith? How does one "Africanize" sexuality research, empirically and theoretically, in an environment that is not necessarily welcoming to African scholars? In Sexual Diversity in Africa, contributors critically engage with current debates about sexuality and gender identity, as well as with contentious issues relating to methodology, epistemology, ethics, and pedagogy. They present a tapestry of issues that testify to the complex nature of sexuality, sexual practices, and gender performance in Africa. Essays examine topics such as the well-established same-sex networks in Accra and Bamako, African "traditions" defined by European observers, and the bizarre mix of faith, pharmaceuticals, and pseudo-science used to "cure" homosexual men. Their evidence also demonstrates the indefensibility of over-simplified constructions of homosexuality versus heterosexuality, modern versus traditional, Africa versus the West, and progress from the African closet towards Western models of out politics, all of which have tainted research on same-sex practices and scientific studies of HIV/AIDS. Asserting that the study of sexuality is intellectually and politically sustainable in Africa, Sexual Diversity in Africa contributes to the theorization of sexualities by presenting a more sensitive and knowledgeable study of African experiences and perspectives. Contributors include Olajide Akanji, Christophe Broqua, Cheryl Cooky, Serena Owusua Dankwa, Shari L. Dworkin, Marc Epprecht, Melissa Hackman, Notisha Massaquoi, Crystal Munthree, Kathleen O’Mara, Stella Nyanzi, S.N.Nyeck, Vasu Reddy, Amanda Lock Swarr, and Lisa Wiebesiek.