Gender Taboos and Homophobia in Unoma Azuah’s Embracing My Shadow: Growing Up Lesbian in Nigeria.

In sexual politics, queer is a concept that describes atypical sexualpreferences and descriptive of a minority that do not subscribe to theconventional gender heterosexual identity. The Nigerian society like manyother heteronormative societies is fixated in its delineation and acceptanceof sexuality and gender. Non-conformity by anyone to the same means cansubject you to any form of homophobia. Nigeria has a queer community.However, legislation in Nigeria still prohibits homosexual relations,prescribing as much as fourteen years imprisonment as punishment forthis in Nigeria’s Criminal Code Act. With diverse calls for the respect ofhuman rights across the globe, Nigeria and Africa at large still cringesat the knowledge of a queer identity and treat same as socio-culturallyalien. Thus, this paper examines the emergent concept of queer inNigerian literature and the relationship between queerness and selfhood in Embracing My Shadow: Growing up Lesbian in Nigeria using the Queertheory. The study finds that, Unoma Azuah’s portrayal of queer charactersin her memoir and Unoma’s several attempts at asserting her queerness asa personal identity is consistent with ongoing agitation for LGBTQ rights.It argues that Azuah’s narrative is contextualised within a social space withstructures that challenge queer as an emerging norm of being. The paperhas therefore argued that Nigeria’s queer literature and the possibility ofqueer’s search for selfhood and domesticity in Nigeria is characterisedby taboos and limits that attest to the complexity of the society and itsespoused sexual norms.