Description
This paper uses (queer) political economy to examine the carceral logics of the transnational anti-gender movement, with a particular focus on gay moral panics and efforts to further criminalise homosexuality in West Africa. The paper advances the existing literature by locating these dynamics within the context of capitalist crisis i.e. by examining the political economy of gay moral panics (and the anti-gender formations that foment them). Drawing on Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian approach, the paper conceptualises gay moral panics as part of an ideological and material project that emerges from an organic crisis of capitalism. To illustrate this framing, the paper explores the relationship between moral panic, carceral politics, and capitalist crisis in Ghana. This analysis sheds light on the multiple scales across which contemporary anti-gender contestations are constituted, how carceral logics animate these contestations within and beyond the state, and the centrality of gender and sexual power relations to capitalist crisis and the political phenomena arising from it. These power relations, the paper argues, are not external to but a condition of existence for the crisis in its current conjunctural form.
