Unexpected Callings: Ancestors and Queer Kinship in Zimbabwe

This event is co-hosted by the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, the Centre for African Studies, the Social Anthropology subject area and GENDER.ED.

Speaker: Raffaella Taylor-Seymour, Junior Research Fellow, Pembroke College, Oxford

Raffaella's talk will examine engagements with ancestral spirits among young queer Zimbabweans. It is set against the backdrop of two powerful lines of argument that frequently call into question queer Zimbabweans’ agency as religious subjects. On the one hand, many local political and religious leaders frame queer intimacies and gender transgression as inherently “un-African”, at odds with both indigenous traditions and Christianity. On the other hand, global gay rights activists have responded to these claims with high-profile campaigns to promote LGBTQ rights across the continent, which often frame queer Africans as victims of religious persecution.

This talk complicates both sets of narratives about queer life by examining relations that young queer people in Zimbabwe forge with ancestral spirits through the lens of queer kinship. Considering the tensions that exist between anthropological ideas about kinship and varied experiences of queer life, the talk examines how ancestral spirits’ choice of queer people as mediums serves to rearticulate idioms of “chosen family”. In contrast to relationships with living family members — which often become tense in light of revelations about queer identities — ancestral spirits actively embrace queer subjectivities and reframe queerness as an intrinsically valuable aspects of a person’s being. In the process, they fulfil desires for intimacy, protection, and understanding from kin, indicating new possibilities for generative forms of intimate dependency.

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is a social anthropologist and Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. In a context in which colonization forcefully upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place, her research explores how young people navigate a shifting religious landscape and devise new forms of spiritual practice. Before coming to Oxford, Raffaella completed her PhD at the University of Chicago where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellow.

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