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"Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the "homosexual threat" they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially "virile" construction of national masculinity. In Queer Objects to the Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging"--

Contents -- A Note on Language -- Introduction -- 1. Moran Sexuality and the Geopolitics of Alterity -- 2. Livelihood and Respectability in Hard Times -- 3. Slippery Intimacy and Ethno-erotic Commodification -- 4. Shortcut Money, Gossip, and Precarious (Be)longings -- 5. Marriage, Madness, and the Unruly Rhythms of Respectability -- 6. In a Ritual Rush: Crafting Belonging in Lopiro Ceremonies -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Glossary -- References -- Index

ABSTRACTAnthropologists have shown how recent efforts to tell apart foreigners from autochthons have played out, often subtly disguised, in panics over objects that may seem trivial: "alien species" of fish, trees, or plants that endanger "local" nature. Little has been said about plastic's dominant position among these objects. In Samburu county, northern Kenya, "plastic boys" are unemployed men whom others despise for being unattached, "useless paupers," who, not unlike plastic itself, have allegedly no capacity to grow roots and thrive. Analyzing this subject position against a wider background of objects and afflictions deemed "foreign"—including plastic bags, plastic rice, plastic hair, plastic smiles, and homosexuality as a "plastic pollutant"—I show how different troublesome objectifications of plastic resonate with one another and their wider context. I argue that panics over plastics and the politics of belonging shape one another, producing new, less‐obvious forms of inclusion and exclusion. [belonging, materiality, plastic, Samburu, Kenya]

"In the economics of everyday life, even ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, and new visions of the future. Throughout Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining or tourism; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other industries; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into the domains of everything from medicine to fashion. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and many other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity?"