Moral panics and “anti-gender” politics: what can (queer) political economy tell us about global struggles over gender and sexuality?

Ellie Gore - Lecturer, Department of Politics, University of Manchester

In Ghana, there has been a turn to increasingly strident forms of political homophobia since the early 2010s. This has been fuelled, in part, by a series of moral panics over sexuality, which date back to the “homoconference” controversy in 2006 through to the 2019 “CSE brouhaha”, prompted by plans to launch Comprehensive Sex Education in schools. A further panic occurred in 2021, when the opening of a LGBTQ community centre in Accra was met with fierce opposition from political and religious leaders, as well as the mainstream media. In the same year, an “anti-LGBTQ+” bill, formally called the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, was proposed within the Ghanaian parliament. The bill—passed in February 2024 but not yet assented to by the President—stipulates the significant expansion of existing anti-LGBTQ+ provisions under Ghanaian law, notably the proscription of all “LGBTQ+ and related activities”. The passage of the bill reflects an intensification of anti-LGBTQ politics within formal, parliamentary politics in Ghana, as well as a broader trajectory whereby homosexuality has become increasingly politicised.

In my book, Between HIV Prevention and LGBTI Rights: The Political Economy of Queer Activism in Ghana, I locate the struggle for queer liberation in Ghana within the longue durée of colonial and capitalist political economy. From a historical perspective, the book explores how the production and policing of sexual and gender hierarchies was essential to the colonial-capitalist project, both within the imperial core and the periphery. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, this entailed the introduction of intensified legal restrictions on sex work (“prostitution”) and sexual relations between men, which operated alongside laws relating to marriage, property, and inheritance to structure and enforce heteronormative configurations of sex, gender, sexuality, and family (i.e. cisgender, binary, heterosexual, married, procreative, nuclear). Meanwhile, across Britain’s colonies, including Ghana (then the “Gold Coast”), new ways of organising and disciplining gender relations were introduced, again premised on heteronormativity and tied to capitalist property and labour relations.

Contemporary gender and sexual orders in Ghana continue to be animated by colonial-capitalist logics, particularly in terms of the primacy of the normative family. Over the past two decades, however, a multi-scalar and transnational set of drivers have served to (re-)politicise homosexuality and reconfigure the landscape of queer sexual politics. These drivers include: the global HIV response, which has increased the visibility of queer men as a biomedical population in Ghana, with highly politicising effects; burgeoning political activism from domestic queer groups, who have become “NGO-ised” through their involvement in development work on HIV; growing concern for LGBTQ+ rights among key development actors, global governance institutions, and Western governments, which has frequently been articulated according to “homonationalist” logics; the strategic mobilisation of homophobia by prominent Ghanaian religious and political leaders, as part of a wider attempt to shore up state and other types of power; and, finally, the rise of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and specifically the prosperity gospel, which espouses “traditional” family values and sexual purity with the promise of material as well as spiritual reward, against a backdrop of economic crisis and widening inequality. As this brief overview suggests, the emergence of pervasive forms of political homophobia in Ghana has not only been shaped by the afterlives of colonialism, but by the rationalities, imperatives, and failures of neoliberal economic development.

In light of these dynamics, political economy is well placed to make sense of sexual struggles around the world, including emerging forms of political homophobia and other, diverse “anti-gender” phenomena. Vice versa, since political economists have paid scant attention to sexuality (with the exception of some feminist scholarship), queer approaches can help us to understand sexual and intimate relations as a key site of power and inequality in the global economy. A queer political economy approach therefore centres the structural, institutional, and material contexts in which homophobia and sexual injustice are rooted and instantiated, from state laws and practices premised on heteronormativity to household arrangements and relations of social reproduction. It also illuminates some of the ways in which political economic processes and power relations shape queer lives and resistance (in the Ghanaian context, for example, through development initiatives focused on sexual health and sexual rights). Given the proliferation of anti-gender politics in the contemporary juncture, amidst a multifaceted crisis of capitalism and the rise of the populist radical-right, a queer political economy approach seems especially valuable, not just in understanding these formations, but in finding ways to resist them.

[1] While “gender ideology” is a capacious and fluid referent within anti-gender discourse, it is broadly used to denote opposition to progressive politics in the realms of family policy, gender equality, gender studies, sexual rights, and sexuality education.