Knowing Women is an ethnography on friendship, desire, and same-sex intimacy among urban, working-class women in southern Ghana. The intersectional analysis of their life narratives situates them in relation to political, economic and social developments affecting Ghana and other postcolonial and African countries, including anti-gay policies and queer activist movements. Paying close attention to the women’s practices of self-reference, the book refers to them as “knowing women” in a way that both distinguishes them from and relates them to such categories as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend(ship). Engaging queer-feminist and postcolonial theories of gender, kinship, and sexuality, the book critically refutes both African nationalist homophobic claims and universalizing claims that categories of LGBT+ identity and can be translated between all languages and cultures. This lecture-performance uses storytelling as means to transfer anthropological and alternative queer knowledges into the public and activist sphere.

Dankwa currently works a specialist for gender, equity and transformation with the NGO IAMANEH Switzerland. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Berne, an MA from the Music Academy of Lucerne and an MA in African Studies from SOAS. She has held the Sarah Pettit Fellowship at Yale University and is the co-editor of Racial Profiling (2019) and Bildung.Macht.Diversität (2021)