Horizons of Touch

Serena Owusua Dankwa’s “Horizons of Touch” begins with an intimate moment during a research interview. In Accra, Ghana, Dankwa speaks with Janet about women’s intimacies; as the conversation ends, Janet asks whether she may give the researcher a peck on the cheek. The light kiss is not written as a romantic resolution. It opens a question about the research relationship: the participant is also interpreting the researcher, who is not the only person asking questions or assigning meaning. Their differences—including social position and the unequal authority of research—do not disappear through recognition, but must be worked through within the relationship.

The essay pays close attention to Janet’s use of the word supi. It is a polyvalent Ghanaian term for an intimate friend or girlfriendship that may include erotic intimacy, and has been associated with relationships among boarding-school girls. Janet says she is “doing supi,” rather than being supi. The verb frames erotic belonging as a practice and relation, not as a fixed identity that must first be declared and then used to explain every experience. Dankwa does not present supi as pure, stable, or sufficient to replace queer as a category. Its range of meaning and its situated use instead keep classification open to negotiation.

“Touch” is more than bodily contact. Drawing on discussions of erotic ethnography, Dankwa asks why academic research often treats distance and objectivity as virtues while casting feeling, attachment, and bodily presence as threats to knowledge. Researcher and participant touch one another in ways that may involve erotic feeling, but also trust, curiosity, care, misunderstanding, and friction; all of this is shaped by power. Acknowledging a relationship does not automatically dissolve inequality. It asks researchers to be more exact about how they enter other people’s lives, what they gain from that access, and what responsibilities follow from proximity.

This method resists two simplifications. One is to apply Western queer theory directly to Ghanaian life, requiring all non-normative intimacies to be understood through “coming out” or fixed identities. The other is to treat queer concepts as wholly foreign and assume that returning to local vocabulary completes decolonization. Dankwa leaves a harder question: when women’s intimacies are translated into international academic and advocacy languages, who benefits from those categories? Who is made into evidence while their own conceptual frameworks are ignored? The essay is about the knowledge responsibilities created by touch, not an idealization of intimacy as a power-free space.

One interview and one research relationship cannot represent Ghanaian women, same-sex intimacies, or “African queerness” as a whole. Dankwa also notes that an earlier, longer version appeared as “Queering” in Basel Anthropology Papers in 2025; the item curated here is the version published in Feminist Africa 6(2). Read alongside FemRes’s The Sex Lives of African Women, the difference in scale is instructive: Sekyiamah’s book brings together many women’s accounts, while Dankwa stays with the concrete, ongoing, and asymmetrical encounter between a researcher and Janet. Together, these works suggest that understanding intimacy requires more than external labels; it also means asking how relationships are practiced, narrated, and researched.

Source. Serena Owusua Dankwa, “Horizons of Touch,” Feminist Africa 6(2). The full article is available on the journal page.