Challenging the local logics of oppression in times of post-colonial amnesia – a study of Ugandan LGBT+ activism in digital media spaces

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of an increasingly repressive environment, the study explores to what degree five established LGBT+ organizations use self-controlled digital spaces, Twitter and Facebook, during one month in 2022 to expose and challenge constructs that rationalize oppression of Ugandan LGBT+. The analysis revealed that digital media spaces were not used to challenge the local logics of oppression or contemporary processes sustaining oppression. Instead, spaces, often displaying a conspicuously uniform Western sexual rights language, focused on providing digital services and/or notification of offline services to the community and promoting the individual organization. The adoption of Western sexual rights campaign language, including using LGBT+ as identity labels to communicate Ugandan same-sex desires and gender identities, could be explained by the community’s dependency on international resources. The study’s contribution lies in its astute reminder – that the realization of digital spaces’ emancipatory potential is dependent on the political economy of the activists' context.

KEYWORDS:

• Uganda
• LGBT+
• activism
• homophobia
• post-colonial amnesia

1. Introduction

Decades of national and international human rights advocacy have successfully changed international human rights instruments, as well as national legislation across the world, to include rights for LGBT+ people (Encarnación, 2017; O’Flaherty & Fisher, 2008). However, acceptance of LGBT+ rights and legal reforms has not been evenly distributed across the world and has, in the last few years, become fiercely contested (Ayoub, 2018; Encarnación, 2017).

Few places represent the friction between the emergent international human rights regime on one hand and local resistance and rejection of LGBT+ rights on the other, better than Uganda. The Government of Uganda’s state-sponsored discrimination became widely known in 2009 with the introduction of the Anti-homosexuality Bill. The bill, which proposed the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality, life in prison forconsensual sex between adults as well as introducing the crime of promotion of homosexuality, was heavily criticized by the international community (Englander, 2011). Transnational human rights organizations, multilateral and bilateral partners, and heads of state not only criticized the Ugandan government but threatened to cut aid should the government proceed with the 2009 Anti-homosexuality Bill (Saltnes, 2021; Saltnes & Thiel, 2021). Brown (2023) argues that the international actors’ heavy-handed ‘bullhorn diplomacy’ when defending LGBT+ rights, that is, public criticism delivered through high-profile media statements combined with threats to cut aid, provoked African partners rather than open up for dialogue around human rights regardless of sexuality and gender identity. The Western actors’ public condemnation and threat to use development assistance as leverage was viewed as a continuation of a century-long Western tradition of imposing and enforcing various social, political, and economic policies on African societies and was subsequently met with fierce resistance (Brown, 2023). The bill was passed by the Ugandan Pariliament at the end of 2013 as "a Christmas gift" to the Ugandan people and widely trumpeted as a testament of Ugandan resistance against unwanted foregin interference (Nyanzi & Karamagi, 2015).

Although the Anti-Homosexuality Act was repealed 10 months after being passed, the interacton betweeen Ugandan actors and internatoinal development partners and trans-national human rights actors, set multiple processes in motion. The 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill was marketed to the Ugandan public as a tool to protect Uganda's culture and sovereignty against Western imperialism as well as ensure the country’s self-determination in domestic matters (BBC, 2011; Nyanzi & Karamagi, 2015). Western development actors’ intense attempts to defend LGBT+ rights further fueled anti-Westernsentiments and resistance against actions interpreted as neo-imperialist interference, which in turn only strengthened domestic resistance. The bill became a symbol of national sovereignty and the right to self-determination. LGBT activists were systematically denied access to discourse-producing spaces, such as public forums and traditional media, to challenge their marginalization and the media's incorrect reporting on the community (Strand, 2011, 2012, 2018). Ugandan media coverage on the Ugandan LGBT+ community ranges from silence to blatant discriminatory and outright hostile, and where tabloid media from time to time engages in calling for the public hanging of alleged homosexuals (Borlase, 2011; Strand, 2018).

Furthermore, the proponents of harsher legislation against homosexuality, consisting of a mix of norm-conservative and populist religious and political leaders financially backed by conservative American churches (Kaoma, 2013), normalized hate speech and violence against LGBT+ individuals (Dicklitch et al., 2012; Human Rights Watch, 2014). Hate crimes escalated in the wake of the 2009 bill, such as physical attacks, arrest, blackmail,and evections as well as hate speech. (Neiman, 2019; Sexual Minority Uganda, 2016). Moreover, Parliament debates and efforts to address the ‘problem of homosexuality’ did not cease after the 2014 Anti-homosexuality Act was annulled. Parliamentarians continued to work motivated by notions of widespread so-called ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by foreign and domestic actors and ‘recruitment of Ugandan children into homosexuality’ (Johnson & Falcetta, 2021). Anti-LGBT+ rights campaigners have thus succeded in not only keeping policy makers focused on further strengthening legal repression of Ugandan LGBT+, but succeeded in creating a homo-hostile public climate. A recent public opinion survey indicates that Uganda is the most intolerant country of the 37 African countries surveyed when it comes to LGBT+ individuals and human rights for the community. Ugandan state-sponsored discrimination enjoys strong public support across all demographic groups (Kakumba, 2023).

International attention and engagement with the Ugandan LGBT+ rights struggle also resulted in a significant increase in financial and technical support to the local LGBT+ community. LGBT+ activism moved from having been sporadic before the 2009 Anti-homosexuality Bill l to becoming organized and strategic (Jjuuko & Mutesi, 2018; Lusimbo & Bryan, 2018). The number of Ugandan LGBT+ organizations mushroomed subsequently (Nyanzi, 2013), and the community has continued to enjoy a privileged position in terms of funding in international comparisons (Strand & Svensson, 2023). The support has, however, been a double-edged sword, as the community’s close affiliation with Western transatlantic LGBT+ rights campaigners and bilateral donors has made them vulnerable to accusations of being neo-imperialist cronies (Brown, 2023; Cheney, 2012). LGBT+ rights organizations’ collaboration with international partners, which, on the one hand, provides protective attention and financial resources, also threatens to undermine their voices. Through the affiliation with the Western human rights infrastructure, the LGBT+ defender's allegiance and motives become questionable in the eyes of many Ugandans . Their voices are thus easy to dismiss on the grounds of being illegitimate ‘foreign agents’ interfering in domestic affairs (Jjuuko et al., 2022).

A recent analysis of Western development actors’ engagement with LGBT+ rights in Africa indicates that the combination of public criticism and punitive measures, such as aid conditionality, is an ineffective way to increase tolerance and acceptance of LGBT+ rights (Brown, 2023). The Ugandan case highlights that international engagement with LGBT rights in the Global South may be counterproductive and even undermine local actors. Brown (2023) argues that LGBT+ rights can and should be supported by international partners, but that support should be discrete to avoid feeding into narratives that LGBT+ rights activism is an imperialist project. But more importantly, LGBT+ rights struggles have to be locally owned and driven to a chance to succeed. Recent successful de-criminalization campaigns in Africa can all be attributed to strong local activism rather than international pressures (Jjuuko et al., 2022). Domestic actors understand the sources of homophobia and the processes that maintain opposition to LGBT+ rights and are thus better positioned to pursue locally relevant strategies to challenge the social construct that enables, or perhaps even mandates, as well as maintains oppression of the community.

1.1. The role of digital media for resisting discrimination and oppression

In a repressive context, information and communication technologies (ICT) stand to offer a range of crucial affordances to marginalized citizens, such as allowing activists to self-represent outside the structures of marginalization, challenging oppressive constructs rationalizing discrimination, raising awareness around effects of marginalization, mobilize, organize, fundraise, network as well as engage in public advocacy; all without having to manifest physically, and thus become targets for violence repercussions.

Several studies highlight ICTs’ importance to marginalized LGBT+ communities to conduct human rights advocacy across the world (Gibson, 2018; Magued, 2023; Mutsvairo, 2016; Ortiz et al., 2019) and Uganda is no exception (Amoedo, 2021; Bryan, 2019; Strand and Larsson, 2023; Valois, 2015). Even if the impact of digital activism, using social media spaces saturated with and organized by commercial interests for communicating civic matters, can be challenged (Fuchs, 2014; Hutchinson, 2021), several of the previously mentioned studies maintain that ICT affordances offer invaluable logistical, organizational and expressive functions, and thus hold emancipatory powers.

Given the past decade’s consistent discreditation of Ugandan LGBT+ voices and the community’s lack of access to discourse-producing spaces, this study explores to what degree Ugandan LGBT+ organizations utilize their self-controlled digital spaces to expose and challenge their context’s local logics of expression. That is, the Ugandan context’s rationale for targeting the community with increasingly harsh legal repression, social discrimination, and violence. The logics will be unpacked further in subsequent sections. However, it can very briefly be described as a complex web of intersecting logics, where heteronormativity and conservative interpretations of Christian teachings, as well as ill-informed understandings of sexual and gender diversity as part of the African social and cultural fabric, forms the core. Moreover, as Ugandan sexual minorities are perceived as antithesis to these pillars of Ugandan culture and moral fabric, and belived to be coopted by Western actors, they have been constructed as an exogenous neo-colonial threat. Finally, the local logics of oppression is enabled and sustained by a collective post-colonial amnesia, that has erased the memory of a pre-colonial Uganda and that the core elements of heteronormativity and conservative interpretations of Christian teachings are the direct result of foreign doctrines introduced over the past century.

The exploration the historical processes involved in the creation of the local logics of oppression and contemporary processes sustaining them, draws inspiration from queer theory broadly. A queer-inspired lens rejects statics and essentialists ‘beliefs that certain phenomena are natural, inevitable, and biologically determined’ (DeLamater & Hyde, 1998, p.10). It thus highlights that Ugandan norms around sexuality and gender identities are socially constructed, and as man-made (human-made) constructs can be challenged and re-constructed. In this study, a queer – inspired lens assisted in unmasking the processes in which contemporary Ugandan understandings and norms around same-sex desires and/or non-conforming gender identities are the product of a century of foreign heavy-handed de – and re-construction work of Ugandan culture, and sexula mores in particular . Finally, this study also seeks to problematize and offer a more nuanced understanding of ICTs as inherently emancipatory and, in particular, understand under which condition emancipatory potentials may become realized.

This paper is organized as follows. After briefly describing the queer-inspired lens, the study introduces the century – long history of foreign actors’ successful norm-entrepreneurial effort, which resulted in the erasure of any pre-colonial tolerance of non-conforming sexualities and gender identities. This section also maps contemporary and more benevolent transnational norm-entrepreneurial efforts to institutionalize sexual and reproductive rights as part of universal human rights and its discursive role in LGBT+ activism around the world. After introducing the elements of local logics of oppression, and contemporary enabling processes; the methods section, introduces the set of qualitative content analysis that was used for analyzing Ugandan LGBT+ organizations’ self-controlled digital spaces. The analysis finds that self-controlled digital spaces are not systematically used for challenging the logics of oppression or take advantage of exposing the historical and contemporary origins. Furthermore, the results indicate that digital content could reinforce the belief that LGBT+ individuals are acting on behalf of neo-imperialist forces, which would undermine activists’ legitimacy in the eyes of fellow Ugandans. By choosing to self-represent and conducting advocacy using an international and transnational LGBT+ rhetorical toolbox, there is little that indicates that digital spaces are used re-negotiating belong in the Ugandan socio-cultural space.

The paper concludes by discussing the potential benefits of a queer-inspired outlook on activist work in Uganda, in particular in the wake of the even harsher legislation, passed in May 2023. The paper also discusses the result and draws broadly on the political economy around LGBT+ activism in Uganda. The study’s contribution to the field of ICT4D lies primarily in its reminder of digital spaces as embeddedness into larger social, political, and, most importantly, economic relations. Activist organizations, activist and activism, albeit always operating on a shoestring budget, still requires a minimum level of funding. Any exploration of digital spaces’ disruptive and emancipatory potential, is thus advised to engage with the social change actors’ economic dependencies parallelly.

1.2. Theoretical inspiration – introducing a queer lens

First of all, there is no singular queer theory (Jagose, 1996). Watson (2005) argues that although ‘queer theory’ is a somewhat misleading term, the field’s scholar tends to have some common points of interests. Researchers share ‘a variety of methods of interrogating desire and its relationship to identity’ and take advantage of ‘poststructuralist techniques of deconstruction to reveal the historical constitution of the sexual subject and cultural positioning of the unified ‘self’ (a self – endowed with a coherent identity including gendered identity), characteristic of the Western constitution of the subject’ (Watson, 2005, p. 67). A queer inspired lens is essentially a critical and social constructionist lens, which opens up for challenging notions of what is percived as a natural sexuality and sexual identity and gender,, as well as therefore understood as universal and trans-historical.

Furthermore, queer-inspired research is rooted in critical theory and often includes action-orientated dimensions to support social change (Watson, 2005). As a tradition, it rejects social organization and normative hierarchies that lead to the marginalization of a particular group in a given society and seeks to support efforts to challenge the status quo, particularly social institutions that uphold hierarchies and privileges. Halperin (Halperin, 2003) argues that despite the lack of agreement on what a queer theoretical framework consists of or should be doing, a queer-inspired research endeavor seeks to identify, problematize and challenge homogenizing discourses around sexuality and gender expressions. A queer lens thus opens up for an unapologetic normative critical positioning. This is one of the core tenets directly relevant to this study. This study seeks to support resistance and disruption to the reproduction of systems that normalize the oppression of LGBT+ individuals, which in the case of Uganda is captured in the local logics of oppression. Finally, Halperin (2003, p. 343) argues queer – inspired researchers should engage in finding new ways to revive the field’s ‘radical potential,’ which he outlines as its ‘capacity to startle, to surprise, to help us think what has not yet been thought.’

A queer theory inspired lens also focus our attention to and allows us to engage with the construction processes that lies behind contemporary local logics of oppression, and spotlight the role of the original architects of today’s naturalized constructs, that is, foreign norm-entrepreneurs’ work inside Uganda over the past century. The term norm – entrepreneurs, simply refers to entities interested in changing social norms (Sunstein, 1996). Norm-entrepreneurial efforts are the activity whereby an individual, non-organization, state, and/or trans-national organization, actively promotes a (new) norm and seeks to move the norm from initial introduction to norm internalization, whereby the norm is fully integrated into the social fabric of the community (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998).

The following sections will outline three waves of foreign norm entrepreneurial efforts to re-construct sexual norms in Uganda. Although it is the first two waves that have laid the foundation for the contemporary local logics of oppression of Ugandan LGBT+, the third and still ongoing – The international sexual rights regime – may unwittingly undermine local actors’ efforts to challenge the logics of oppression and the post-colonial amnesia that sustains erroneous beliefs around African sexuality as singularly heterosexual.

1.3. A century of foreign norm-entrepreneurial efforts

While contemporary Ugandan public discourses frame same-sex desires and non-conforming gender identities as a product of Western neo-colonialism (Boyd, 2013; Cheney, 2012; Ibrahim, 2015; Sadgrove et al., 2012), multiple historical sources independently confirm the existence of same-sex desires across pre-colonial Africa, including Uganda (Epprecht, 2004, 2008, 2010; Murray et al., 2021). Indeed, historical sources indicates a degree of acceptance toward non-conforming sexualities, sexual pluralism, age-differentiated homosexuality, and gender fluidity as long as local models for kinships and reproduction were respected (Murray et al., 2021; Tamale, 2007). With historical sources indicating at least some level of acceptance , it could be argued that pre-colonial societies appeared to exhibit a degree of queerness. With the invasion of the British Empire and Christian missionaries; social constructs around sexuality, sexual identity, and gender as well as local sexual mores became the target of concerted norm-entrepreneurial interference. Due to space constraints, the following section will only briefly introduce the three main waves of foreign norm-entrepreneurial interference – Colonial social engineering, Christian - colonizing of the soul- past and present, and finally, the International sexual rights regime – and their enduring impact in terms introducing and/or enabling the contemporary logics of oppression.

1.4. Colonial social engineering – institutionalizing heteronormative

Active social engineering targeting Ugandan norms and understanding of sexuality began with the British colonial rule in the early 1900s. The colonial administration began promoting monogamous, marital, and procreative heterosexuality as a means to ensure enough able bodies to secure labor-intensive exports (Summers, 1991). As the colonial administration was largely unsuccessful in implanting theirideals, it began cooperating with the Christian missionaries that were proliferating at the same time. The missionaries introduced reproductive evangelism, and through repeated social purity campaigning concisisting of a mix of Christian teachings and Victorian ideals , heteronormative became the pervasive norm (Summers, 1991). The marriage of convenience between the colonial administration and missionaries managed to establish a ‘system of norms, discourses, and practices that constructs heterosexuality as natural and superior to all other expressions of sexuality’ (Robison, 2016, p. 1). Through the political economy of heterosexuality, same-sex desires and relationships became a legitimate target. Murray and Roscoe (1998: xvi) conclude that the ‘colonialist did not introduce homosexuality to Africa but rather the intolerance of it – and system of surveillance and regulation for suppressing it.’

In the last years of the nineteenth century, the colonial administration codified its heteronormative script. It introduced legal grounds for surveillance and punishment of ‘Unnatural offenses’ or sodomy in the British colonies (Human Rights Watch, 2008). At independence in 1962, the Ugandan government,kept the colonial laws criminilizing same- sex desires and has, since the turn of the millennium, introduced several new laws, including the recent AHA2023, which consolidate early norm-entrepreneurs’ efforts to institutionalize heteronormativity (Hollander, 2009; Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum, 2023; Human Rights Watch, 2008).

1.5. Christian colonizing of the soul- past and present

At the time of independence, Christianity was deeply embedded within Ugandan society and had developed into the primary force shaping Ugandan morality and social mores as well as public opinion on sexual and reproductive rights (Ward, 2015). However, despite the long history of promoting heteronormative ideals, it is a relatively recent phenomenon that Ugandan sermons specifically mention homosexuality as a sexual sin and an abomination to God, as well as ‘a sin along with other societal ills’ (Ward, 2015, p. 132).

Unlike the first wave norm-entrepreneurs, i.e. the British colonial administration, the second wave is still ongoing. In the past two decades, Pentecostal or Born – again, revival churches, have emerged as the most powerful norm-entrepreneurs when it comes to policy reform and public opinions on sexual and reproductive rights for LGBT+. Zambian scholar Kaoma (2013) argues that the last decade’s shift in public opinion on non-conforming sexualities and gender identity and rejection of LGBT+ rights cannot be fully understood outside American ultra-conservative churches’ active norm-entrepreneurial efforts in Ugandan and Africa more broadly. Their transnational norm-entrepreneurial activities systematically target faith leaders with anti-gender messaging, including notions that the emerging universal LGBT+ rights agenda promoted by development partners is exogenous to Africa and constitutes an imperialist threat against African families and social mores (Kaoma, 2013). Elected officials have similarly been targeted (Kaoma, 2013; Oliver, 2013).

Another critical enabler of recent years’ surge in homophobic sentiments and heteronormative moral revivalism is post-colonial anxiety, brought on by poverty, a sense of dislocation, and a lack of faith in the political system (Karlström, 2004). The revival of ‘kingship and rituals of social reproduction as primary loci of moral rehabilitation’ in the 1990s was a collective attempt to regain some control in a fast-changing world (Karlström, 2004, p. 595). Local religious elites, often with the support of international norm-entrepreneurs have been particularly responsive to their base’s anxieties and connect to them by demonstrating their commitment to upholding biblical morality and proclaiming that they shall not be coopted by what is framed as Western degenerative sexual norms (Oliver, 2013).

In conclusion, the first and second wave of foreign norm-entrepreneurs successfully managed to introduce the core elements of the contemporary local logics of oppression, that is, heteronormativity, and that heterosexuality is the only type of sexual desire that is condoned by God. Although these historical and ongoing processes have enabled the construction of same-sex desires as exogenous to Uganda, it could also be argued that Western transnational sexual rights and LGBT+ rights activism have unwittingly contributed to and enforced popular beliefs that LGBT+ rights are foreign inventions and thus constitute a form of imperialism.

1.6. The international sexual rights regime – an (un)witting colonizer

The third wave of norm-entrepreneurial influences, consisting of UN, international development partners, and later transnational LGBT+ rights activist networks, emerged in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in late 1990. Third-wave actors argued that although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not explicitly list sexual rights, it still grants all individuals the right to enjoy bodily autonomy and freedom to choose for themselves. The UN Human Rights Council played a crucial role in situating sexual rights within a broader human rights framework, calling attention to discriminatory laws, and reminding states of their obligation under international human rights law. Sexual rights advocacy was made intelligible using the global lingua franca of human rights (Law, 2018), and citizen rights language to advocate for sexual rights in national contexts (Corrêa et al., 2008).

The gradual introduction and subsequent integration of sexual and reproductive rights into a universal human rights paradigm should also attributed to the emergence of LGBT+ civil society organizations in the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as, later, transnational advocacy networks. LGBT+ activism also rendered a significant shift in development policy and practice. In the past decade, the EU and so called like-minded nations have undergone ‘major organizational, legal and discursive shifts in the visibility and acknowledgment’ of LGBT+ individuals in development policies and programmatic responses (Klapeer, 2018b, p. 102). This discursive shift has also led to the emergence of dedicated and increased financial support for LGBT+ activism worldwide (Global Philanthropy Project, 2021). The Ugandan LGBT+ community has enjoyed a privileged position compared to other countries when it comes to attracting international financial support. Since the beginning of monitoring of earmarked financial support to LGBT+ activism in the Global South, Uganda has been one of the primary recipients ( Strand & Svensson, 2023).

Despite the recognition and inclusion of sexual rights into international rights frameworks and even greater social acceptance of sexual diversity beyond a heteronormative paradigm, sexual rights continue to be a divisiveness issue (Thoreson, 2014; Weiss & Bosia, 2013). The framing of LGBT+ rights as a universally valid construct and equating queer rights a la the West as a marker of modernity and social progress is deeply problematic when it is used to support a neo-colonial project of ranking countries along a modernization theory-inspired scale, rending the West superior and the rest developing (Rahman, 2014). The promotion of LGBT+ rights as an inextricable part of human rights in development policies and programs has thus been criticized and accused of being neo-colonial (Klapeer, 2018b). Klapeer (2018b) introduces the term ‘homodevelopmentalism,’ which attempts to capture the processes where an international and Western LGBT+ rights agenda is combined with traditional modernization frameworks in the development industry. Puar (2013, p. 338) argues that the international ‘human rights industrial complex,’ broadcasting of ‘Euro-American constructs of identity (not to mention the notion of a sexual identity itself) that privilege Western understanding of sexuality and identity politics, ‘coming out,’ public visibility, and legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress’ is deeply problematic.

Uganda has felt the full weight of the international community, consisting of both bilateral and multi-lateral development partners, as well as transnational LGBT+ activist networks when it comes to its discriminatory polcies on LGBT+ (Klapeer, 2018a; Saltnes & Thiel, 2021). Intense public criticism and threats of withdrawing aid unless Western prescriptive policies are adhered to have been seen as a direct form of poorly veiled Western imperialism and, thus, an attack on the governments’ hard-earned right to self-determination in domestic matters (Ibrahim, 2015). Indeed, by promulgating and enforcing universal meanings around sexuality and gender expressions, as well as unwittingly negating the existence of sexual pluralism and gender fluidity in the process; development and transnational LGBT+ rights actors mimic, albeit from a different vantage point, the modus operandi of previous colonizers. Unwittingly, development actors and transnational LGBT+ rights activists have, through their uniform framing of sexual rights, universalizing terminology around sexuality and gender identity, captured in the acronym LGBT+ rights, contributed and reinforced a component of the local logics of oppression – That same-sex desires and non-conforming gender identities are Western constructs and thus exogenous to Uganda.

In conclusion, contemporary local logics of oppression are the result of a century of successful foreign norm-entrepreneurial de – and re-construction work of local understandings of sexuality and gender identities. As man-made social constructs, they are, however, also possible to expose, challenge, and un-do. These constructs’ foreign origins have however conveniently been forgotten or erased. With decriminalization and successful human rights campaigning most likely dependent on local voices being perceived as legitimate stakeholders rather than international heavy-handed pressures, exposing these constructs’ true origin as well as their architechts may constitute a strategic opportunity. The following section introduces the methods used to engage with local activists using self-controlled digital media spaces to challenge the local logics of oppression.

2. Methods and materials

Social media offers unique opportunities to gather a large and diverse range of content without the need for intrusive data collection (Andreotta et al., 2019). Unlike other types of data collection, where data is created at the initiative of the researcher, social media data is the result of social interactions in natural digital environments and can thus be more ‘ecologically valid than traditional approaches’ (Andreotta et al., 2019, p. 1766). In the case of Uganda, where the local LGBT+ community has a long-standing and strategic relationship with international media, development partners, and transnational LGBT+ actors, as well as is financially dependent on these actors , collecting primary data is fraught with challenges. Accessing un-provoked and untampered data is thus key to engaging with the topic of, if and how self-controlled spaces are utilized for challenging the local rationales behind oppression.

Murthy (2017, p. unnumbered) notes that big data approaches to social media content are ‘often ill-suited to more in-depth contextualized analysis’ and argues for the use of more qualitative approaches combined with a clear description of the researchers’ ontological and theoretical position (Murthy, 2017). This paper is, as previously described, inspired by a queer perspective and thus firmly grounded in constructionist and critical traditions. Qualitative content analysis was chosen based on the nature of the study’s inquiry.

Qualitative content analysis is ‘a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns’ (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1278). This study uses three types of content analysis – a conventional, a summative, and directed analysis – to analyze the selected organizations’ self-controlled digital spaces. It should also be acknowledged that the researcher’s 15-year long-term engagement with the Ugandan LGBT+ rights struggle, first as a development practitioner and later as a participatory action research-inspired scholar, has greatly facilitated the interpretation of the data. Both positions have provided access to privileged information and insights, albeit from different vantage points.

As this study enters the empirical universe of Ugandan LGBT+ organizations’ use of digital media, with a theoretically inspired focus, the exploration of the material commenced with a directed approach to content. A directed approach entails engaging with empirical material, drawing conceptually upon a specific theoretical framework, including the theories’ variables of interest and/or key conditions (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). A directed content analysis also draws upon the situational understanding of the context. To concretize the analytical process further, each post/tweet was asked the following questions: Does it challenge the oppression of Uganda LGBT+ and exposethe local logics of oppression by (a) challenging heteronormativity, (b) local interpretations of God’s will and/or, finally, (c) post-colonial amnesia concerning pre-colonial sexual pluralism, and/or more broadly a century of foreign norm-entrepreneurial interference with Ugandan understanding of non-conforming sexuality and gender identities.

However, as the directed content analysis only produced a handful of posts/tweets for analysis (see results section), the analysis was supplemented by a conventional content analysis. The conventional qualitative content analysis was motivated by a simple question – If digital media spaces are not used for exposing and disrupting local logics of oppression in the Ugandan context, what is it used for? The purpose of a conventional qualitative content category is to, through immersive and iterative readings, identify ‘patterns and themes that are directly expressed in the text or are derived from them through analysis’ (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1285). The results of the conventional qualitative content analysis, which generated a set of themes, subsequently grouped into two broad categories of functions: Organizational promotion and Service to the Ugandan LGBT+ community (see Table 2), is also presented using a summative content analysis. A summative analysis is a continuation of the conventional content analysis, but with the addition that it quantifies the existence of a particular content. To quantify the prevalence of identified themes, each post/tweet was coded, containing one and, in some instances, two themes. That is, in the cases where a post/tweet contained an equal emphasis on human rights advocacy and self-care messaging, it was coded as both. About 20 percent of the material was coded into two categories. The summative analysis is presented through a series of graphs (see result section) that were generated using the Excel chart function.

The results of the two later sets of analysis – conventional and summative content analysis – are, however, dependent on a process of interpretation, where the relative dominance or, indeed, absence of a particular content is situated and made sense using context-specific knowledge (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). As stated earlier, the author has 15 years of context-relevant experience, which assisted in the interpretation. Finally, as the results from the content analysis indicated that digital media spaces functioned as a key space for organizational self-promotion, instead of challenging the logics of oppression, the analysis was supplemented by a second directed content analysis of the organizations’ self-referencing language. The tweets/entries were read and coded on the presence of a Western linguistic repertoire for human rights advocacy and self-referencing, captured in concepts such as gay, homosexual, and the acronym LGBT+ as well as advocating for LGBT+ rights. With LGBT+ being framed as exogenous to Uganda and their foreignness being a key element of the local logics of oppression, the choice of self – labeling and self-representation, is likely to carry significant meaning in the local context. In the case of Uganda, the choices in the linguistic repertoire of self-referencing language and advocacy can either align the international development community and Western transnational LGBT+ rights actors or be embedded in local meaning systems.

2.1. Material and sample period

Qualitative content analysis is labor-intensive, which typically impacts the amount of data that can be processed. As the Ugandan LGBT+ landscape has proliferated substantially during the last 10 years due to the influx of international funding to LGBT+ advocacy and at least 46 organizations were active on one or multiple self-controlled platforms prior to the Anti-homosexuality Act of 2023 (Strand & Svensson 2023), a selection of organizations was necessary. Five organizations that fulfilled the sample criteria and represented a range of voices were selected (Table 1). Combined, the organizations thus represented a range of factors that potentially could be related to willingness to confront the logics of oppression.

Table 1. Selection criteria for organizations

Heterogeneity	To successfully compete for resources, civil society actors typically need to find a niche and claim to fill that lack of services and/or attention to the under-services groups and/or thematics. The sample sought to ensure heterogeneity in terms of the organization’s profiles.
Longevity	By having existed for more than 10 years, the organization is likely to have successfully delivered on its stated raison d'être, as well as had time to understand the elements of and processes behind local logics of oppression, as well as positioned itself in a hostile environment.
Digital media presence	Regular digital media use is a sign of the space’s relevance to the organizations. Only organizations that were active, in this case, published at least one self-penned or re-posted/re-tweeted entry per week on either Facebook or Twitter were included.

Guided by the selection criteria, the following organizations were selected: Organization A, which was established in 2003, is one of the largest individual organizations with an extensive international network. Organization B was established in 2003, and organization D, established in 2012, is rooted in feminist traditions. Organization C, established in 2004, has primarily focused on the LGBT+ community’s health rights with special attention to HIV prevention and access to treatment. Finally, organization E, established in 2006, focuses on LGBT+ youth and rural populations . Due to the criminalizing ‘the promotion of homosexuality’ in May 2023, the selected organizations have been anonymized for their protection. The selected organizations’ Twitter and Facebook entries, including duplications for one month, 1–31 January 2022, were downloaded and analyzed as described earlier.

It should be noted that although the study design attempts to include a variety of organizations to capture the variation in the LGBT+ community, it still only provides a glimpse into the community. The Ugandan LGBT+ community contained well over a hundred organizations, prior to AHA, 2023). The study’s relatively limited timeline, that is, covering a singular month, constitutes another limitation. Nevertheless, this study’s snapshot of the community in early 2022 provides a meaningful and hopefully helpful time capsule of the community before the introduction of the odious and vague offence of promotion of homosexuality. The current study can thus besides its core line of inquiry, serve as a baseline upon which the AHA, 2023’s impact on digital activism in Uganda can be better understood.

3. Results

The results section is divided into two sections: the directed qualitative content analysis, followed by the conventional content analysis and summative analysis.

3.1. Disruption of the local logics of oppression

To explore digital spaces’ role and contribution to exposing and challenging the local logics of oppression in the Ugandan context, and thereby supplement other forms of activism and emancipatory efforts, the directed content analysis specifically sought to identify and engage with content that explicitly challenged the components of local logics of oppression and the processes behind.

The directed analysis found only a handful examples of where the local logics of oppression and its supportive processes were exposed and challenged. A retweet by organization B (Figure 1) is one of the most explicit examples of an attempt to expose the long history of contemporary state-sanctioned homophobia and society-wide discrimination. The entry calls attention to the fact that homophobia is a result of colonial and religious norm entrepreneurial efforts to re-construct Ugandan sexuality and gender identities as uniformly heterosexual.

Figure 1. Organization B retweet, 29th of January, 2022.

A re-tweet from organization A (Figure 2) spotlights foreign religious norm-entrepreneurs’ active contribution to oppression and violence against LGBT+ individuals. Without directly exposing any specific actor, the 27th of January 2022 tweet exposes unidentified religious actors as homo-hostile actors and promoters of violence against LGBT+ individuals. Their use of what appears to be the Bible, exposes the role of biblical teachings in creating and sustaining one of the critical elements of the logics of oppression. That is, the notion that sexual diversity is an abomination.

Figure 2. Organization#A, retweet, 27th of January, 2022.

Another re-tweet from organization A, in connection to the former Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo's death, also calls attention to the role of religion as part of the logics of oppression. The late pastor and Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity made a name for himself as one of the most outspoken representatives of state-sanctioned and religiously inspired hate campaigning. The tweet contains a good-riddance – message, signaling that neither this campaigner nor his use of Christian teachings as a legitimizer of oppression, will be missed. As the analysis only found two more entries that made implicit references to the earlier described logics of oppression, it was concluded that self-controlled media spaces are not used for challenging the logics of oppression or the contemporary post-colonial amnesia that secures their continued survival.

3.2. Strategic use, but targeting different objectives

With only a handful of examples of entries directly challenging the local logics of oppression, the analysis was expanded to include a broader look at the corpus of digital content. The exploration was guided by a simple question – If self-controlled digital spaces are not used for confronting the local logics of oppression, what other functions do the spaces appear to have?

The conventional qualitative content analysis generated several categories, which can be clustered into two broad content categories: Promotion of the organization and Service to the Ugandan LGBT+ community (Table 2).

Table 2. Content categories generated through the conventional qualitative content analysis

Content category	Sub-category
Promotion of the organization	Visualizing networking efforts, the organization’s network status, and existing affiliations, showcasing – this is who we are connected to.
	Visualizing organizational activities and work process (workshops, meetings, capacity building)
	Acknowledging /celebrating organizational accomplishments, including individual activist’s accomplishments and recognition
Services to the Ugandan LGBT+ community	Circulating Uganda and /or international LGBT+ news from local and international media outlets
	Classifieds – work and/or education opportunities
	Marketing organizational services, such as LGBT+-friendly health services and social events
	Self-care: Promoting and educating on mental and physical well-being, including inspirational messaging on self-love.

The content analysis thus indicates that self-controlled digital media spaces, are fulfilling other strategic needs than tackling the local logics of oppression. The category promotion of the organization can be summed up as the marketing of the organization, its programs, and projects to external audiences. The category, Service to the LGBT+ community, captures the different digital and offline services the organizations provide to the Ugandan LGBT+ community. Furthermore, there seem to be significant differences between the organizations in terms of the mix of strategic focus and what they emphasize in the channels. The summative content analysis’ graphs therefore report data on the sub-category level (Figures 1–6), as the organizations’ unique profiles would otherwise be missed. Sub-categories related to the Promotion of the organization are visualized through striped patterns, and Services to the community related content is visualized using dot-patterns. The summative content analysis also highlighted clear differences between the organizations’ frequency of use of their digital spaces. Organizations A and B were the most avid users of both Facebook and Twitter, but with a preference for Twitter. Each graph contains the total number of Tweets/posts used for generating the graph (n=).

Figure 3. Organization A. Twitter use, January 2022.

Figure 4. Organization A, Facebook use, January 2022.

Figure 5. Organization B, Twitter use, January 2022.

Figure 6. Organization B, Facebook use, January 2022.

Organization A had a clear focus on human rights advocacy on Twitter, followed by content that visualized the organization’s networking efforts, network status, and local and international partnerships. It also used its space on Twitter to disseminate LGBT+-related news generated by local or international media, promote self-care, raise awareness, and educate the LGBT+ community on mental and physical well-being, including inspirational messages on self-love. The organization’s Facebook content profile is slightly different, with visualizing the organization’s work given an equal amount of space as human rights advocacy and visualizing who the organization is affiliated with and therefore supported by. Moreover, Facebook contained some content that was purely local, such as invitations to local events, classified for consultancies and educational opportunities.

Organization B is equally active in using its self-controlled spaces to disseminate content, but exhibits a distinctly different content profile. For organization B, Twitter appears to be community-oriented as it is dominated by content intended to support the community’s psycho-social well-being. The content has a clear emphasis on raising awareness of physical and mental health issues in the LGBT+ community and the effects of living in a hostile environment. The organization prioritizes sharing concrete advice on various self-care techniques. The organization also uses its space to disseminate job and educational opportunities and promote its own services to the community, such as legal aid, health care, counseling, etc.

Organization B’s Facebook space similarly emphasizes promoting self-care but with a slightly lower frequency. Unlike Twitter, the organization’s Facebook spaces are also used to showcase the organization's network connections and local and international partnerships. Facebook does not appear to be used for human rights advocacy in any significant way, which may be a reflection that Facebook is officially banned and thus has a more limited reach.

The number of posts for organizations C, D, and E is significantly lower than that of A and B. The three smaller organizations posted between one and three posts per week in January and appear to favor Twitter over Facebook. The larger organizations, A and B, post almost daily on their preferred channel and sometimes multiple times in a single day (Figures 7–9).

Figure 7. Organization C, Twitter use, January 2022.

Figure 8. Organization D, Twitter use, January 2022.

Figure 9. Organization E, Twitter use, January 2022.

The summative content analysis indicates that the most active organizations, A and B, use their self-controlled digital spaces to first provide various digital services and information on offline services to the Ugandan LGBT+ community and, secondly, promote their respective organizations. Organizations A places a relatively strong emphasis on both broad human rights advocacy as well as visualizing their work and affiliations on both Twitter and Facebook. Organization B focuses on increasing awareness of the importance of LGBT+ mental and physical well-being, including self-care in hostile surroundings, rather than promoting the organization. The distinctness of the respective profiles and differences not only between the two leading organizations but also between the three smaller organizations, indicates that in a environment where all organizations compete for attention and funding, they appear to have developed a way where they add different value and services to the Ugandan LGBT+ community, but without directly competing with each other.

Besides the variations in content profiles, there are also a few interesting similarities and, in particular, the relative prominence given to self-promotion. All organizations, except organization C, dedicate a significant part of the space to showing off affiliations and, in particular, international partners, as well as visualizing their organizations’ day-to-day work, such as documenting workshops, annual planning meetings, strategy meetings, and capacity-raising activities. These posts/ tweets that spotlight the organization’s network, partnerships, and organizational outputs are items that could be featured in a quarterly or semi-annual report to a donor. Given the fact that Ugandan LGBT+ organizations are entirely dependent on international financial support, the relatively strong emphasis on curating the organization’s visibility and highlight its relevance is understandable. Ugandan LGBT+ organizations are constantly fundraising and have historically been successful in securing international support (Strand & Svensson, 2023).

To sum up, the set of content analysis indicates that digital spaces are used both for traditional activism-related activities, such as information and news sharing, human rights advocacy, and community services, as well as for strategic visibility management. The organizations, particularly A and B’s content profiles, give grounds for arguing that some, particularly better-resourced organizations, appear to have developed non-competitive unique content profiles. , Given the relatively strong focus on curated self-promotion , combined with the lack of content that challenged local logics of oppression or enabling contemporary processes and enablers, it is possible that organizations primarily target international funders rather than local publics.

3.3. Navigating the linguistic repertoire for HR rights activism

Triggered by the results from content analysis, which found that a significant part of the content is dedicated to showcasing organizational partnerships and advertising organizational output, the material was re-read to probe further into the organizations’ self-representations. The guided reading took advantage of the author's prior knowledge of the LGBT+ community’s close ties to transnational LGBT+ activist networks and development partners. The directed content analysis directly explored the presence of the global lingua franca of human rights (Law, 2018) and the use of Western essentialist understanding of sexuality as fixed and stable, summed up in the concepts homosexual, gay, and the acronym LGBT+ or LGBTIQ+, and advocacy for LGBT+ rights.

The corpus is dominated by the global language of human rights, manifested in advocacy for sexual rights and all organizations use a Western lexical repertoire for self-representation, such as LGBT+ or variations of the essentialist understanding of sexual desires and gender expressions. Msibi (2011) argues that all terms used for labeling non-conforming sexualities and gender identities have their own separate historical raison d'être; that is, they are products of a specific context and era and should not be understood as meaning the same thing regardless of context (Msibi, 2011). Msibi (2011, p. 57), therefore, argues that both ‘the concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘gay’ have no meaning in Africa, as they come from a specifically historical and political Western experience’.

Despite a century of concerted efforts to erase non-conforming sexuality and gender expressions, including the promotion of Western essentialist labels for non-conforming sexual orientations and/or gender identities, Uganda is not void of local constructs. The term kuchu (kuchus in plural) is used for describing queer Ugandans in particular in and around the capital city of Kampala (Nyanzi, 2013). The term has some similarity to ‘gay,’ in the sense that it has a political dimension and has been appropriated as an empowering label (Peters, 2014). Moreover, Peters (2014) argues that the term is intrinsically different from the LGBT+ acronym with its roots in Western-derived sexual and identity politics and should not be understood as a vernacular version of the LGBT+ acronym. A kuchu identity is inseparable from the individual’s family and community obligations and embeds them in relations of material exchange. It thus avoids the divisiveness of Western identity politics, where individual identity is seen as separate from community.

The Ugandan organizations do, however, not make their organizationas, human rights activism or work in general intelligible using the local kuchu concept. Rather than kuchu rights, organizations present their work as work for human rights, LGBT+ rights, and/or sexual rights. The local term, kuchu, is only used in connection with one local event – The Annual Kuchu Remembrance Day, the 26^th of January. The day was instituted in 2020 by the community in a move to celebrate the legacy of murdered activist David Kato Kisule.

The five organizations’ adoption of the global lingua franca of human rights and, in particular, LGBT+ rights, which, similar to English, is not spoken by everyone, is understandable. Given the long history of state-sanctioned oppression and lack of domestic resources for funding, activism; it is most likely a strategic decision to adopt a Western human and sexual rights language and tie the community to international actors’ human rights discourses and funding flows, as well as seek its protective attention in a language they speak. The level of rhetorical uniformity is most likely an unintended consequence of dependency on international funding.

4. Discussion

Against the backdrop that ICTs emancipatory potential is never given, but always dependent on social agents realizing it; this study sought to engage with how Ugandan LGBT+ organizations used their digital media spaces to expose the local logics of oppression as well as the post-colonial amnesia that secures the logics’ continued survival. As presented earlier, the five Ugandan organizations’ Facebook and Twitter use of self-controlled digital media spaces was strategic but not necessarily emancipatory in the sense that it challenges the elements and processes that facilitate systemic oppression of the Ugandan LGBT+. Instead, digital media spaces were primarily used for other purposes, such as promoting the organizations and providing service to the LGBT+ community through disseminating news and information as well as awareness raising on mental and physical self-care in hostile contexts. Moreover, the analysis revealed that posts and tweets displayed a conspicuous uniform Western human and sexual rights advocacy rhetoric, and where same-sex desires and gender identities were presented in Western essentialist terms, as in LGBT+, rather than using local concepts. The surveyed organizations, with few exceptions, opted for using the global lingua franca of human and sexual rights to make themselves and their work and services intelligible.

Although the use of international constructs to express and communicate around non-conforming sexuality and gender identities historically has been a powerful strategy across contexts, in the post 2009 Anti-homosexuality- era it may be a risky strategy. Donors’ bullhorn diplomacy, threats to cut aid in response to the AHB2009, coupled with portraying Ugandans as underdeveloped and barbaric only strengthened resistance against what was perceived as a discursive invasion. The heavy-handedness and condescending tone mimicked historical interactions, where colonizers would use their power to impose and enforce their social, political, and economic policies. By adopting an international human and sexual rights rhetorical framework, local actors provide further ammunition to the local logic of externality. By adopting Western human and sexual rights rhetoric, the local LGBT+ community provides an unintended ‘proof’ to Ugandan political and religious elites’ claim that LGBT+ activism is a form of neo-colonial interference. Through their linguistic alignment with Western donors, they thus become an even easier target for accusations of being neo-colonial agents of Western governments and inter-governmental organizations engaging in what has been called homo-colonial interference (Thiel, 2014). . . To appear as an accomplice to Western development partners and the human rights industry undermines the legitimacy of Ugandan LGBT+ voices and, ultimately, their ability to challenge the social constructs that dictate the oppression of LGBT+.

4.1. Digital activism and renegotiating belonging using a queer-inspired tactical framework

With the passing of the Anti-homosexuality Act (AHA2023) in May 2023, the Ugandan government extended the colonial-era criminalization of same-sex desires further. The AHA2023 provides for sentencing perpetrators of consensual same-sex relations up to life in prison and makes ‘aggravated homosexuality’ punishable by death. The AHA2023, also contains a number of clauses that aim at directly silencing LGBT+ activism and cutting activists off from resources, as well as introducing surveillance by mandating Ugandan citizens to report crimes listed in the Act. The clause ‘promoting homosexuality’ is particularily insidious , and directly targets LGBT+ rights advocacy and is committed when a person publishes, broadcasts, or distributes ‘any material promoting or encouraging homosexuality or the commission of an offense under this Act’; or ‘operates an organization which promotes or encourages homosexuality or the observance or normalization of conduct prohibited under this Act’ (‘Anti-Homosexuality Act,’ 2023). In April 2024, the Constitutional Court of Uganda rejected a petition launched by a coalition of Ugandan civil society organizations seeking to annul the law on the grounds of it being unconstitutional. With the court’s decision to uphold the law, the foundation for a new and even darker chapter in the oppression of Ugandan LGBT+ was secured.

The new level of oppression and, in particular, the criminalization of the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ adds another treacherous layer to the environment in which activists need to tread carefully. Cognizant of the fact that the vague offense of promoting homosexuality has yet to be fully specified through legal precedent, queer – theory could prove to be useful when re-formulating digital advocacy strategies and content. . A queer-inspired gaze approaches culture, including sexual culture, as constantly in flux and open for reconstruction by social actors. A queer theory-guided activism would thus besides engaging in exposuring the multiple waves of norm-entrepreneurial efforts that have socially engineered Uganda into becoming a intolerant and homophobic country; , challenge activists to explore their own social constructionist’s muscles . Queer-inspired activism may also facilitate a move away from activism that is locked in a mode of perpetual reactiveness and adoption of external discursive material , and instead inspire work that generates a new ideational terrain.

Future digital activism that successfully challenges or at least disrupts the logics of oppression in Uganda is dependent on LGBT+ actors being viewed as legitimate stakeholders. To claim legitimacy as a stakeholder in Uganda will be a formidable challenge, and it will most likely not benefit from a continuation of the close linguistic and conceptual alliances with the international human rights industry. The past close linguistic and conceptual affiliation has likely reinforced the popular belief that the Ugandan LGBT+ community and its sexual rights agenda are a poorly veiled form of imperialism. A re-imagined activism could take advantage of the queer-inspired tool box that calls for problematization of homogenizing discourses around sexuality and gender expressions, which in this case all emanate from the West. With sexual desires and gender identities being embedded, constructed, re-negotiated, and realized in a unique social context, it could prove to be beneficial to explore how local systems of meaning, including terminology, can be utilized to develop new social constructs capturing Ugandan non-conforming sexuality and gender identities’ embeddedness and belonging. To escape accusations of merely being a rebranded Trojan horse bringing destruction to the Ugandan social order, re-imaged and re-formulated constructs need to be the product of imaginative local intellectual labor, as opposed to borrowed from struggles fought elsewhere. This paper does not argue that excavating and re-fashioning pre-colonial constructs on sexuality and gender is necessarily the way forward. Rather, local activists could attempt to boldly explore their own norm-entrepreneurial muscles in starting a renascence, where pre-colonial constructs are explored, critically examined, reinvented, and updated to give a new meaning of what it is be kuchus in Uganda today. Using a locally embedded and perhaps even creating a new meaningful linguistic repertoire will likely render better or at least different results.

This re-orientated activism would, however, require international funders and allies to revisit their modalities of support to LGBTQ+ actors in the Global South. Support that enables local empowerment needs to offer activists total freedom to negotiate local constraints and conditions, construct their own unique localized rights claims, as well as how to communicate them. This would entail that funders and allies will be forced to learn new languages or accept that local activism may not always make sense to them. ’ Finally, the study’s result is a stark reminder that an examination of digital spaces’ emancipatory potential needs to engage with the political economy of activism . The results also call attention to funders’ inescapable responsibility to continuously engage with the fact that even well-intended support may distort and thus produce undesirable outcomes. These contributions may not be entirely novel. However, with several African countries actively exploring laws similar to that of the Ugandan AHA2023, and human rights defenders experiencing increased levels of persecution across the continent, it may nevertheless be important reminders.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2020-04003].