Narrating the Nigerian queer female subject: self-theory and forbidden desire in She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak

What insights do the various narratives in She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak offer us into the forms of female desire that power forbids and stigmatizes? To answer this question, this article explores the narrativization of the Nigerian queer female subject in the anthology by reconciling the politics of forbidden desire with the critical narratological practice it conceptualizes as self-theory. Drawing on ideas from Kopano Ratele, Kimberle Crenshaw, Unoma Azuah, Adam Phillips, and so on, it argues that the cis and trans female subjects in She Called Me Woman self-theorize their forbidden queer desire through narrativization, taking into account the various identities that intersect within them, while recognizing a surplus of being that may transcend those identities; and the result of this practice is a critical and complex (re)negotiation of the ‘official’ and often exclusionary indices of Nigerianness/Africanness, together with the place of queer female subjects within these identities. The significance of this intervention is that it enriches our understanding of the value of narrativizations like those in She Called Me Woman, while simultaneously amplifying the voices of queer folk in Nigeria, whose lives are often absent in official accounts of Nigerianness.