Namibia's Rainbow Project

Robert Lorway is Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba where he holds a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

"Overall, Lorway convincingly illustrates that the refiguring of identity categories and subjectivities by Western aid organizations is not the solution to Africa's problems with homophobia or to the violent dilemmas faced by so many LGBT Africans. As in many other circumstances involving Western aid, it often does more harm than good."—Africa"Namibia's Rainbow Project is a very important book as it helps make sense of the time the Rainbow Youth live in and of how they can transform the situations they are facing. This book is creative and formulates key questions on the current Namibia's social, economic, and political reality that help enlighten the African situation as a whole. This book is ideal for teaching and for young researchers who need to know the complexity of projects about politics and health in Africa."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly"[This book] should be compulsory reading for all those GLBT groups that have embraced global issues and forgotten the dangers of wading in without very carefully thinking through the long-term implications of immediate action."—Gay and Lesbian Review"Namibia's Rainbow Project is a monograph that will captivate readers and help to dispel persisting misconceptions about queer Africans. This book is likely to interest students and scholars of social movements, gender, and sexuality in southern Africa and scholars who specialise in Namibia."—Journal of Southern Africa Studies"Enriches our understanding of some very subtle and controversial cultural changes that have big political and health implications. The achievement of sexual minority rights will not be an easy or straightforward progress narrative."—Marc Epprecht, author of Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa"A vivid ethnography that presents a challenging analysis of the paradoxical effects of a project that follows the model of many, many parallel projects all over the world. Engages a specific locality with societal problems and theoretical issues. Ideal for teaching."—Peter Geschiere, author of Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in Comparison

• AcknowledgementsPrologue: Approaching the TransnationalIntroduction1. The Instrumentality of Sex2. Subjectivity as a Political Territory 3. Remaking Female Citizenship4. The Naturalization of Intimate Partner Violence5. Thinking Through the Foreigner FetishConclusion: Post-structural ViolenceNotesBibliographyIndex