Introduction: media, gender, and sexuality in Africa

This introduction to the special issue “Media, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa” highlights the pressing need for a more comprehensive and nuanced body of scholarship on feminisms, gender identities, sexualities, and media representations across Africa. While important research has emerged in recent years, significant gaps remain, particularly in understanding how sexuality is constructed, contested, and mediated within diverse African contexts. Employing feminist and intersectional frameworks, this issue brings together contributions from Anglophone West and East Africa that engage with a range of media focal areas—from film and journalism to political communication, rhetoric, and postcolonial studies. We aim to position this special issue as a critical intervention in the ongoing decolonial turn within feminist media and sexuality studies, advocating for more inclusive, context-specific analyses. We further call for collaborative, cross-regional scholarship that engages underrepresented areas, such as Francophone, Lusophone, and Arabic-speaking Africa, where overlapping constraints like language barriers, politicized public discourse, and the criminalization of queer identities, continue to hinder scholarly access and participation. By addressing these persistent gaps, we will foster a richer and more inclusive understanding of gender, sexuality, and media across the African continent.