Enforcing the “Unnatural Offence”: Sodomy Legislation and Anti-Queer Panoptic Policing in Uganda

Abstract This article investigates the impact of the widespread characterisation of sodomy laws as “unenforced” or “unenforceable,” arguing that this presumed inactivity is a political fiction that obscures the broader governance functions these laws perform. Focussing on Uganda, the research draws on over a decade of data, including parliamentary debates, Police Annual Crime Reports, civil-society documentation, and ethnographic fieldwork. With these data, the article traces how the category of the “unnatural offence” became a capacious site for moral panic, political mobilisation, and everyday enforcement. Analysis of crime-reporting patterns reveals that peaks in heterosexual sexual harms routinely catalyse intensified political focus on homosexuality, illustrating how sodomy law functions as a technology for displacing and re-narrating sexual crises. The article theorises social panopticism to describe the dispersed legal, institutional, and extralegal practices that collectively produce carceral conditions for queer and trans Ugandans. It concludes that decriminalisation requires dismantling the broader normative and institutional infrastructures that sustain queer criminalisation.