"Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa" with Lydia Boyd & Emily Burrill
IAH Zoom Talks: Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill
The UNC authors discuss their recently released edited volume, Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State, which began as a conference hosted at the IAH in Spring 2016. In the book, Boyd and Burrill, along with their contributing authors, detail how legal efforts in African countries can often be moralizing enterprises, closely tied to notions of ethics, personhood, and citizenship. In evaluating these ideological struggles as they play out in different African contexts, the authors offer a reconsideration of modern history of human rights on the continent. The authors draw on different case studies to illuminate these dynamics, such as marriage legislation in Mali, family violence experienced by Cameroonian refugees in the United States, sex education in Uganda, and statutes criminalizing homosexuality in Senegal.
Boyd is an associate professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies. Burrill is an associate professor in the Department of History.