Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana by Serena Owusua Dankwa. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Knowing Women explores the limit of language to account for female intimacies that defy a rigid categorization and the culturally sensitive way of navigating same-sex desire in a country that is politically and religiously averse to same-sex desire. Dankwa draws on the phrase “knowing women” to articulate female intimacies that can be ostensibly sexual and non-sexual. As an ethnographically rich account, the author relies on informal methods including rumors, innuendos about same-sex desiring women both in recruiting and interviewing her respondents. Rumor is an episteme of knowing about othered lives due to the consequences of exposure. Rumor appears at least 20 times in the entire book. The book’s rich ethnographic account adds to the life accounts of queer Africans emerging in the form of memoirs, autobiographical accounts, and documentaries. Also, the book centers the unruliness of sexuality outside how it has been constructed historically by religion and medicine. The five-chapter book, with an introduction and conclusion, uses a multidisciplinary approach that emphasizes friendship rather than sexuality to trouble ideas of gender, kinship, and same-sex desire in Ghana while accounting for ways that they overlap and detour from those of Europe and North America.

In Chapter One, weaving together a constellation of interdisciplinary literature, Dankwa draws on the rumored conference planned by same-sex desiring people to protest against discrimination and equal rights, which turned out as fake. Drawing on the furor that the hoax conference generated, Dankwa examines the dissension among multiple stakeholders in Ghana and globally about same-sex desire. Specifically, the author shows the contradictory and compelling ways that local same sex and transnational activism collide and converge, as well as the polemics and possibilities they offer in how we name and understand sexual differences. For instance, the politics of naming in the global sexual rights movement “ignores the shifting ways in which same-sex intimacies are configured, articulated, and understood in different African contexts” (49). Conceptually, the author jettisons the overused term “supi,” which in recent history is used in a derogatory manner for same-sex desiring women and adopts the phrase “knowing women.” Knowing women accounts for many registers, but primarily, it refers to women who value and pursue intimate same-sex desires and awaken the desire for this love in other women.

Chapter Two draws on respondents’ memory across generations, newspaper articles, video films, market and religious publications, and fiction to trace the etymology, gap, and shifting representations of supi in Ghana’s public imagination. Its early use indicates friendship undergirded by exchanging gifts and letters not necessarily mapped by sexual intimacy. Over time, it has assumed changes. The author explores the centrality of space from the football pitches, funerals, churches, birthday parties, dances, gatherings, and educational events in initiating and connecting multidirectional same-sex desire and intimacies. Specifically, Dankwa ties supi to a learning process that involves becoming aware of one’s sexual feelings, negotiating, and figuring out how to read the erotic promises in others. Further, in its conflicting and contradictory genealogy, supi links with nurturing senior officers of a male Asafo group with motherly qualities and in the Akan indigenous worldview as “the place where your spirit resides” (96).

Chapter Three examines how the fluidity of gender allows women to enjoy same-sex desires and navigate heterosexual relationships while fulfilling motherhood roles and matrifocal duties. This chapter extends the frontier of gender and sexuality by showing that butch-femmes erotic responsibility in Ghana is not determined anatomically but rather by social roles as providers and age. Further, Dankwa shows how economic reality curtails butch masculine ideals and the various styles and flirtatious strategies deployed to make up for the breadwinner ideal. Fundamentally, Dankwa insists that gender is situational, and that the relationality of gender depends on range of qualities such as charisma, lineage affiliation, reproductive capacities, and entrepreneurial success. Succinctly, “the grammar of gender” differs from the linguistic binaries of most European languages (40).

Chapter Four explores how socio-economic conditions facilitate the initiation and sustenance of same-sex desire across generations spanning ethnic, national, social status, and religious differences. Intimacy serves varied purposes, including intergenerational solidarity, financial and emotional support, and mentorship. Importantly, Dankwa reveals how the web of exploitation, abuse, domination, and manipulative practices that shape these intimacies blurs “the boundaries between fostering and exploitation” and seduction and aggression (203). In addition, Dankwa troubles the perspective about the competitiveness of women’s intimacies vis-a-vis that of heterosexual relations. Dankwa posits that this framing has its roots in the European-American context and heteropatriarchal ideas in which women’s subjectivity is framed as subordinate. Beyond romanticization, Dankwa also shows the fierce passion of female intimacies in fights, breakups, makeup, schemes, squabbles, reconciliations, triangular jealousy, and accusations of witchcraft and the web of relationships that serve as go in-between and matchmakers in the mediation of same-sex relationships.

In Chapter Five, Dankwa examines how terminologies such as “sibling”—when used by women to describe same-sex practice and relationship—destabilize Western biologically fixed understanding of siblings and how this term can veil same-sex intimacies and trouble our notion of queer family formation. Dankwa argues that queer families exist in Ghana even when they do not mirror the homogenized way they are often conceived and asserted in Europe and North America. For instance, marker of intimacies and community of care formed around it, such as raising children together and naming children after one’s partner, taking care of each other’s elders, and joint networks can shroud queer family formation.

From a political standpoint, the book reveals how postcolonial patriarchal politics complicate the lives of same-sex desiring women and the ways women navigate without always claiming global sexual rights labels for fear of retribution. In addition, it shows how culturally sensitive ways of knowing, including rumor and gossip, can supplant colonial anthropology and its problem of peeping through the keyhole into the “native” bedroom. Methodologically, the book speaks to the slippery terrain that researching intimate lives poses and the place of the erotic in field given that some of the respondents tried to initiate same-sex desire with the author. Epistemologically drawing from situated knowledge and nuanced language with culturally inflected meanings in same sex relationships in Ghana makes the book contribution to gender, language, and sexuality studies an addition to extant work that has drawn on archives.