Dennis Ekwemnachukwu Okeke
I interrogate the Association of Catholic Information in Africa’s (ACI Africa) mediated coverage of same-sex marriage blessings, following Fiducia Supplicans’s publication, to expose how religious discourse enacts “de-queering” by erasing, pathologizing, and delegitimizing queer African identities. Through discursive strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation, mitigation and intensification, and perspectivation, ACI Africa reproduces colonial heteronormative logics that cast queerness as an alien, immoral threat to “an authentic African subjectivity.” This essentializing rhetoric invokes tradition, morality, and cultural sovereignty to uphold a monolithic, heteropatriarchal Africanness while rendering queer existences invisible and deviant under a veneer of pastoral compassion. Drawing from postcolonial queer theory, I argue that such religious news media not only silence queer voices but also reinscribe colonial epistemologies that police sexual and gender diversity. By theorizing “de-queering” as a critical intervention, I challenge normative sexual exclusions, advance intersectional, decolonial praxis that center queer African epistemologies, resists heteronormative violence, and imagines transformative queer futures in Africa.