676 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 42.3 • 2022 DOING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH KNOWING WOMEN Rachel Spronk Why will Serena Dankwa’s monograph on same-sex desiring women in Ghana become a classic? There are myriad reasons why it should, of course. It is about a group of women who hardly fgure in academic research. It is captivating, describing women’s lives and using them to open up scholarly discussions. It is eloquently written. Most important, it is based on exceptional research. People’s experiences and lives are centered rather than “the textual and discursive rep- resentations of contemporary Africans.” 1 Even as the scholarship of queer African studies comes of age, the feld boasts few empirical studies. Dankwa’s book dem- onstrates why this matters. It is not a question whether empirical studies are more valuable than discursive analyses based on litera- ture, art, or popular culture. Indeed, research from the humanities has played an immense role in “freeing our imaginations” to understand and research queer sexu- alities. 2 Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana, however, indicates that most work on queer gender and sexualit is based on particular choices, such as relying on the participation of those who are able to speak a language like English. In the emerging scholarship of queer studies in Afri- can societies, few studies depict people’s mundane lives or the everyday realities of work, family, and leisure beyond metropolitan environments. As the feld of queer gender and sexualit in Afri- can societies is incipient it remains understudied, if not marginalized. Within the personal networks of researchers on gender and sexualit in Africa, many worked under the radar, were forced not to publish their work, or simply gave up, while others did not even venture into the study of gender and sexualit. At the same time, many MA theses, PhD dissertations, and working papers on gender, sexualit, and diversit are fnished at Ghanaian and Kenyan universities, the ones I am familiar with. There are many reasons why these young scholars did not pursue an academic career, or why their work is not published. As Akosua Adomako- Ampofo points out, it is the scholar’s obligation to fnd this literature as part of her study. 3 At the same time, the challenging circumstances in African institutions for studying queer gender and sexualit also means that most work is undertaken by non-Africa-based scholars, or by African-based activist organizations and networks. These groups and networks are tpically part of global networks that have gained ground over the last ten to twent years and that have put queer gender and sexualit prominently on the agenda. This situa- tion has proven to be both enriching but it also poses some challenges. Even before Dankwa could start her formal research, she ran into the difcult of locating interloc- utors. In a context where many who pursued same-sex intimacies did not identify as lesbian or gay in Western terms, it was not easy to fnd them. Female same-sex cultures thrived on a tacit knowledge that operated in the absence of a public discourse of sexual orientation. It was thus a strugle to fnd women who do not rec- ognize themselves in the “grand identarian schemes” of feminist or queer solidarities that “assume a joint identit or engage in participatory research methods” (7). In other words, Knowing Women depicts the chal- lenge of studying lives that resist the intelligibilities and discursive regimes of metropolitan subcultures and their scholarship and activism. Dankwa’s inter- locutors understand themselves as knowing women. Their knowledge is acquired by experience, that is, the knowledge and know-how developed by daily realities. “The epistemological challenge was to identify women who were intimately involved with each other without assuming either the primacy of their sexual liaison over other aspects of their friendships or a fxed boundary between sexual and nonsexual intimacy. This would have privileged and reifed ‘sexualit,’ the very cate- gory I set out to question” (3). Dankwa describes the necessit of her own unlearning. And this is the crux of the book: “To what extent is sexualit, as an analytical category, the appropriate lens through which to con- ceptualize . . . same-sex desires and intimacies” (36)? Although this is not an entirely new question in anthro- pology, which is Dankwa’s background, it remains a pertinent one, as her book testifes. The women Dankwa worked with understand their same-sex experiences as a “silent trade,” which is part of Ghanaian logics of culturally valued tacit knowl- edge. Knowing Women consists of fve extensive chap- ters in which the ethnography of women’s lives speaks back to academic and activist discussions about iden- tit, erotics, kinship, marginalization, sexual rights, and livabilit. Chapter 1 tells how the landscapes of neoliberalism and religion have brought sexualit into discourse. LGBT+ activism, the growth of religious (i.e., Pentecostal) hegemony, and the media that rein- forced them have created a context in which sexualit Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/42/3/676/1667246/676spronk.pdf by Universiteit van Amsterdam user on 06 January 2023