Southern African Queer and Trans Narratives in Digital Landscapes (Gender and Sexuality in Africa and the Diaspora)

Book info: Southern African Queer and Trans Narratives in Digital Landscapes (Gender and Sexuality in Africa and the Diaspora) (Hardcover, 252 pages) – Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. Language: English.

Focusing on Southern African perspectives, this groundbreaking book explores how digital spaces offer alternative avenues for queer and trans visual cultures in Africa as manifested and shared through popular social media platforms. In its analysis of the dynamic intersection of queerness/transness, African identities, and social media, this book sheds light on the complexities, challenges and transformative potential of these emerging digital platforms and cultures. Through close textual and semiotic readings of content on sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), the authors demonstrate how queer and trans content creators harness visuality, performance and algorithmic visibility to challenge heteronormative scripts and narratives of gender and sexuality. Providing an in-depth analysis of how visual cultures function as archives, sites of protest, and spaces of worldmaking for gender and sexual minorities, this book rejects colonial epistemic frameworks to advance a decolonial queer and trans project which foregrounds fluidity, embodiment and diasporic interconnection. The authors explore this important intervention in African queer studies and digital media scholarship, highlighting both the transformative power and precarity of online queer and trans lives in repressive, unaccommodating and unequal contexts. Editorial Reviews Review

“Born out of comradery-collaboration that developed online, this co-authored book by two seasoned scholars, Ncube and Sibanda, offers fascinating insight into the importance of digital spaces for African queer world- and community-making. Without romanticizing the digital space as a site of agency, liberation, and freedom, the authors skillfully elucidate how queer and trans people in Southern Africa navigate, negotiate, and appropriate online platforms boldly and creatively in a quest for self-representation and self-fashioning. Doing so, this book foregrounds digital worlds as crucial to imagining and shaping queer African futures.” ―Adriaan van Klinken, Professor of Religion and African Studies, University of Leeds, UK

“Southern African Queer and Trans Visualities in Digital Landscapes is a remarkable work, turning queer and trans curiosity into a method: life-giving, affirming, and defiantly joyful across borders. In capturing the wit and imagination of Southern African queer and trans communities, Sibanda and Ncube give us scholarship that is as bold as the worlds it documents.

This tantalizing work of African queer and trans worldmaking is alive with digital and queer languages, vitality, and audacious refusal.

A must read for the curiously queer and queerly curious!” ―zethu Matebeni, Independent Scholar

“This exciting book is not just about stories of woes but also of hope, joy, affirmation, and resilience. Sibanda and Ncube built this book on many voices and many stories (i.e. content creators) who crisscross digital platforms and physical spaces. Through this examination, the book highlights the regional, continental, and diasporic voices speaking back to and centering around the African continent.

The authors demonstrate that the African queer/trans body is central to our understanding of contemporary African body politics and the history of the digital present, as mediated by capitalist tools. This is a must-read for scholars, students, journalists, and anyone interested in African body politics, and the role of queer/trans African content creators in challenging what we think we know about Africa.” ―Shola Adenekan, Associate Professor of African Literature, Ghent University, Belgium

About the Author Princess A. Sibanda is Postdoctoral Fellow with the SARCHI Chair in Waste and Society at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a Humboldt Research Fellow at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany.

Gibson Ncube is Lecturer of French Language and Francophone Literature and Cultures at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.