Ethnic and Gender Marginalization, or Queer Resistance and Survival? The Politics of Comedic Female Impersonation in Ghanaian Digital Spaces

This article examines how female impersonators on Ghanaian digital platforms occupy a precarious space where they are simultaneously marginalizing minority populations while strategically navigating and surviving a sexually restrictive environment shaped by platform-driven economic incentives. Drawing from the concept of ‘economies of visibility’ and overlapping concepts of ambivalent queerness and disidentification, I investigate how performances of femininity negotiate questions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in digital spaces. Findings show that while these performances create space for critical dialogue that offer opportunities for resistance, they frequently rely on stereotypes that sometimes reproduce the very hierarchies they otherwise unsettle. I argue that performances should be understood as a contested political terrain shaped by the entangled pressures of marginalization, survival, resistance, and commercial visibility. I conclude by calling for feminist and queer scholarship to engage digital creators through critical dialogue that holds these contradictions in tension rather than resolving them prematurely.