Queerying the Queer: A Puritan Christian’s Reading of Queered Sexualities and Identities in Selected African and African-American Queer Novels

Abstract

This paper undertakes to read the queered sexualities and identities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Damon Galgut’sIn a Strange Room and Sello Duicker’s Thirteen Cents from the critical lenses of a puritan Christian. The study, thus, deploys the Reader-Response and Queer theories as its theoretical frameworks. The study is motivated by the growing ideological spaces allotted to African queer studies; and aims to join the discussion by offering a puritan’s angle to the African queer arguments. Among the specific LGBTQ identities and sexualities interrogated in the paper include bestiality/zoophillia, phytophilliac or dendraphilliac, Spectorphilli, incest, rape/molestation, masturbation, polyamorous relationship, homoerotic, homosocial, and heterosexuality. These identities and sexualities are read or interpreted based on laid down Bible principles not necessarily to generate homophobic sentiments but rather to query the moral and didactic underpinnings of these practices in the light of societal mores, stability and progress of the human race, as problematised in the selected texts. The reading reveals that certain queer practices run counter to extant Bible precepts and do not make for a harmonious world order as they are seen to be products of dysfunctional societal institutions. Thus, they are predicated on exploitation, oppression, destruction and unequal, unbalanced and unnatural relationships.

Typography as a regime of reading/looking in Toni Morrison’sThe Bluest Eye (1970)

“…Sofiani et al (2019) state that in The Bluest Eye, it is very difficult for Pecola to develop her own identity because the influence of the contexts gives negative selfimage, lack of self-esteem, anxiety, and trauma (p. 262). Emmanuel and Etim (2019) research shows in a novel such as The Bluest Eyes, one can locate the textualisation of queer acts such as paedohilia, phytophillia or dendraphillia, zoophillia, spectorphillia and polyamorous relationship, among others (p. 281). Escott (2019) argues that whiteness is represented as being equal to transhumanism which makes Pecola seek solace outside her race.…”