This book adds to a small but increasing scholarship on same-sex intimacy and desire in Africa. Serena Owusua Dankwa's ethnography brings alive the everyday lives and intimate discursive practices of supi – defined by the author as working-class women who love women in postcolonial Ghana. Dankwa does an excellent job of showing how the lives and the narratives of erotic subjectivities thrive.

Dankwa promises a (decolonial) interruption of the hegemonic ways in which ‘queer’ others’ experiences are perceived in juxtaposition to the ‘modern’ homosexuals, and she delivers on this. Even though Dankwa keeps reminding us that supi don't self-identify as – nor make much reference to – lesbian or the ‘modern’ homosexual, there is a constant dance between erotic subjectivities of supi and the globalized Western identity of lesbians that travels through all the chapters. For instance, even though supi female masculinity is framed as relational, there is referencing of Western notions of butch/femme. Eurocentric framings of the modern homosexual seep through each chapter, appearing as a point of reference. Indeed, decolonial feminism usefully offers us ‘a lens to understand the hidden-from-view interconnections between race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality’.Footnote ² The gender aspect is generously offered in this book, showing how erotic subjectivities produce democratized knowledge on gender and sexuality. Less is provided about its entanglement with race in a postcolony like Ghana. One is left wondering: in what shape or form does race manifest through sexuality and knowledge production? Could the juxtaposition of the supi (queer other) with the modern homosexual in a postcolony such as Ghana fall within the traps of positioning and further privileging Eurocentric modes of knowledge production, as a lens through which African sexuality is perceived? There is a racialized distinction in the binary between the erotic subjectivity of supi and the modern homosexual framed within Eurocentric notions, a binary that decolonial scholarship could unpick.

The notion of secrecy as central to this ethnography is entangled in female same-sex eroticism. It meanders and appears in various forms, implicitly or explicitly, at times given centrality such as in Chapter 2. For instance, one representation of it is around the ‘coming out narrative’ versus secrecy. One of the central aspects is the play and passion growing out of erotic promises of giving, receiving and reciprocity that have to be disguised and handled as secret. Secrecy is entangled with keeping the same-sex intimacies flourishing. Moreover, there is a tension between secrecy and silence, where Dankwa makes reference to Signe Arnfred's question of the conceptual usefulness of a ‘culture of silence’ that is said to mark African societies.Footnote ³ However, one is left wondering in what ways meaning is assigned to secrecy by supi. The book makes strong connections between secrecy and hiding, but perhaps there could be more to it than just that. Indeed, the ‘cultural turn’ foregrounds the ‘production and circulation of meaning through language’ in different areas of social practice.Footnote ⁴ This begs the question: for supi, what sort of meaning or currency was attached to secrecy? Narratives of freedom are vast but are central to social justice. When the notion of freedom is evoked, do supi exploit secrecy as freedom to exist outside the confines of the everyday heterosexism that is heavily encoded in Ghanaian society? Perhaps the proposition here is of engaging with secrecy as a lens. Given that the concept is so central to the ethnography, one is left wanting to know more.

Dankwa particularly centres gender in this book through the analytical lens of sexuality. The system of sex/gender/sexuality is troubled in the way Oyèrónké OyéwùmíFootnote ⁵ and Ifi AmadiumeFootnote ⁶ engage with it as situational gender. The male and female in the book are understood and articulated as relational and situational categories, especially so in the chapter on female masculinities. The expressions of supi whose gender expression is masculine include playing football as a sanctuary for female masculinities or not doing ‘women's work’ such as sewing. The meaning-making around football and not being able to give birth or the surprise that came with Janet Aidoo (whose gender is a masculine expression) getting pregnant all speak to the complexities and interruptions of masculinities and femininities being ‘housed’ in one body. In the South African context, violence is deployed as the main mode of surveillance of female masculinities.Footnote ⁷ One is left to wonder how they are surveilled in a postcolonial context such as Ghana that is heavily encoded in heterosexuality.