Queer and Trans African Mobilities

Winner, ASR Best Africa-Focused Edited Collection by the African Studies Review

Recent years have seen increased scholarly and media interest in the cross-border movements of LGBT persons, particularly those seeking protection in the Global North . While this has helped focus attention on the plight of individuals fleeing homophobic or transphobic persecution, it has also reinvigorated racist tropes about the Global South.

In the case of Africa, the expansion of anti-LGBT laws and the prevalence of hetero-patriarchal discourses are regularly cited as evidence of an inescapable savagery. The figure of the LGBT refugee – often portrayed as helplessly awaiting rescue – reinforces colonial notions about the continent and its peoples.

Queer and Trans African Mobilities draws on diverse case studies from the length and breadth of Africa, offering the first in-depth investigation of LGBT migration on and from the continent. The collection provides new insights into the drivers and impacts of displacement linked to sexual orientation or gender identity and challenges notions about why LGBT Africans move, where they are going and what they experience along the way.

B Camminga is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. Their work considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North and the physical embodied journeying of African transgender asylum seekers globally. They are the author of Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa (2019).

John Marnell is a researcher and PhD candidate at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the author of Seeking Sanctuary: Stories of Sexuality, Faith and Migration (2021).