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“We Do Not Want This Sickness!”: Religion, Postcolonial Nationalism and Anti-Homosexuality Politics in Uganda

Adams, Tyler Anthony
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306889389

Abstract Details

2011, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Geography.
Uganda made international headlines in October 2009, when Member of Parliament (MP) David Bahati proposed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The bill would require the death penalty for certain acts of homosexuality. International pressure has made the bill’s passage unlikely, but the politics that went into producing it continue. This thesis examines these politics, asking how it is that homosexuality came to be conceived as such a grave threat as to require the death penalty. I analyze the statements and writings of various Ugandan anti-homosexual activists, including Pentecostal pastors and state leaders, tabloid exposés and the text of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Ugandans have come to understand homosexuality through American Christian Right, postcolonial nationalist, and local religious movement discourses. Together, these discourses make homosexuality a grave threat to and a neocolonial imposition upon the African heterosexual family, the laws of God, and the Ugandan nation. They come together to produce an imaginary multiscalar geography of homosexuality that precludes a homosexual national subject. I find that the bill consolidates and solidifies practices of policing, employed by a fundamentalist revival movement, already at play in Uganda. I suggest that the very dynamic that makes the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill unlikely, namely the structure of the international political economy in which the African state must answer to Western states before its own citizens, galvanized the writing of the bill in the first place.
Mary Thomas, PhD (Advisor)
Mathew Coleman, PhD (Committee Member)
Franco Barchiesi, PhD (Committee Member)
98 p.
African Studies; Geography
Anti-Homosexuality Bill; Uganda; Pentecostalism; Balokole; Christian Right; evangelicalism; postcolonialism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Adams, T. A. (2011). “We Do Not Want This Sickness!”: Religion, Postcolonial Nationalism and Anti-Homosexuality Politics in Uganda [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306889389

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Adams, Tyler. “We Do Not Want This Sickness!”: Religion, Postcolonial Nationalism and Anti-Homosexuality Politics in Uganda. 2011. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306889389.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Adams, Tyler. "“We Do Not Want This Sickness!”: Religion, Postcolonial Nationalism and Anti-Homosexuality Politics in Uganda." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306889389

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2011, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.