Queer Women’s Intimacies and the Making of the Homespace in Northern Nigeria

Banu, Suraiya Zubair

Abstract

This thesis addresses the contradictions in dominant discourses on northern Nigeria, which set up the northern Nigerian home as a heteronormative space and cast queer northern Nigerian women as abnormal and queer intimacy as marginal or foreign. The thesis therefore examines the ideologies of the northern Nigerian homespace from the vantage point of stories by and about queer northern Nigerian women. The investigation responds to two key research questions. First, what do queer stories by and about queer women tell us about the ideologies of the northern Nigerian homespace? Second, what is the role of intimacy, desire and the erotic in queer women’s space making?
To answer these questions, I use storywork as a methodological framework that builds on decolonial feminist and queer methodologies to examine the ideologies, theories and ethics put forward in narratives about the northern Nigerian homespace. The thesis uses critical discourse analysis to examine an assemblage of stories including oral narratives by queer northern Nigerian women, as well as novels, songs and poetry by and about queer northern Nigerian women. These methods foreground northern Nigerian women as knowledge creators and provide insight into queer perspectives that are often unavailable in official archives.
These stories point to the ongoing existence of matricentric ideologies that queerly push back against the hegemonic heteropatriarchal conceptions of the home. The thesis finds that queer northern Nigerian women’s matricentric space-making expands our understanding of matricentricity beyond heteronormativity, and that queer women’s intimate relations are examples of queer matricentric space-making within and beyond the heteropatriarchal northern Nigerian home. These findings make it possible to understand that matricentricity as an indigenous ideology is given continued vitality through queer life, and to reconceptualise northern Nigeria as a space in which queerness is integral rather than marginal.

Citation

Banu, S. Z. Queer Women’s Intimacies and the Making of the Homespace in Northern Nigeria. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 24, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00506755
• Additional Information: 310 pages
• Award Date: 2025