How Moral Panics about Sexual and Gender Diversity Help Reshape Local Traditions in Ghana

An Overwhelming Consensus? How Moral Panics about Sexual and Gender Diversity Help Reshape Local Traditions in Ghana

In June 2021, the Ghanaian parliament introduced a bill to criminalise LGBT* people and their advocates. The bill’s supporters are working to create a movement that equates belonging to the nation with heterosexual culture. Local peoples, identities, expressions and desires that fall outside heteronormativity are thus seen as alien and existential threats to the nation. This paper shows how the desire to repress these social categories makes them visible through the public debates that actors provoke. The stated impetus to moblise is the anti-colonial pursuit to protect “Ghanaian family values”. Yet, these are evidently shaped by Christian ideologies, historically disseminated through colonisation. The bill’s supporters attempt to secure a monopoly on truth in debates by producing new discourses on targeted minorities, while (re)defining “tradition,” “culture” and “values”.