Unexpected Intimacies: Exploring Sasso Relationality in Postcolonial Ghana

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore what I term Sasso relationality–a framework for making sense of the untenable space where heteropatriarchal intimate commitments randomly fail to reproduce its normative mandates on the body. By exploring Sasso worldmaking in the postcolonial context of Ghana, I use autoethnographic narratives to closely examine the modes of relating that allows for spontaneous desires and pleasures to occur in particular spaces conditioned by heteronormativity. In doing so, I argue that Sasso relationality blurs the rigid boundaries that tend to separate normativity and nonnormativity in how we theorize queer relationalities. Thus, I conclude that explorations of Sasso relationality allow queer scholars to challenge Western normativities around sexuality by contesting what constitutes queerness in the Ghanaian cultural context.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer relationality
• sassoi
• Ghana
• queer Africa
• necropolitics

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.