Queer women making families in Nigeria: negotiating cultural and legal challenges

This research aims to understand how queer Nigerian women form families within Nigeria’s socio-cultural and legal context. Through the stories of six queer women, I explore the challenges that queer persons in Nigeria encounter as they navigate their intimate arrangements and attempt to secure autonomy in their lives. Using queer and African feminist scholarship, I interrogate how heterosexuality and heteronormativity reproduce inequalities by governing gender relations within sexual life, and roles and responsibilities within families while critiquing colonist narratives that reproduce the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family as the ideal. Going beyond traditional ways of knowing, I utilise storytelling, creative writing, illustrations, imagination, and art to present an alternative approach to knowledge production, one that listens and engages with those persons whose familiar relations have been made invisible by the law and hegemonic power relations. Through this study, I hope to encourage a shift beyond the binaries of heteronormativity to challenge us to rethink the institution of family, by reimagining all the possibilities for family structures that could exist.