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Articles

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2020)

Who is a Homosexual? Rhetoric and the Construction of Ugandan Gay in Selected Ugandan Op-Eds

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70060/mak-mawazo-2020-281
Submitted
April 1, 2026
Published
December 31, 2020

Abstract

Leading scholars of media and public discourses such as Nancy Frazer (1992) and Michael Warner (2002) have variously argued that the media cannot be neutral when the issue under debate is an explosive subject such as sexuality, race, or gender. Deploying textual analysis, I apply Frazer’s and Warner’s point that the media advances particular points of view to a collection of op-eds that discuss homosexuality in one Ugandan newspaper and one news magazine – Daily Monitor and The Independent – to uncover the image of this subject that emerged from these texts between December 2013 and June 2014. My textual analysis concludes that while most of the op-eds allegorised homosexuality in order to comment on ‘larger and more important’ issues affecting the Ugandan polity, some texts depicted homosexuals as either pariahs or perverts.