Queer and Trans African Mobilities

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.

[A] sensitive, textured, and comprehensive investigation of queer and trans migration … a vibrant and valuable addition to the scholarly literature surrounding queer and trans migration. It is an exceptional volume, with an impressive array of contributors, that makes for a dynamic, refreshing, and in-depth investigation of queer and trans migration on and from the African continent., This urgent, compelling, and carefully curated volume is a vital corrective to the field of queer and trans migration studies. By decentering an emphasis on legal regimes, Euro-American perspectives, and South-North migration trajectories, Queer and Trans African Mobilities fills gaps in knowledge and understanding that have existed for decades. As a whole, the essays in this book invite readers to expand their thinking on migration narratives, securitization regimes, belonging, and what it means to think about queer Africa. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone who teaching about queer and trans migration, gender and sexuality on the African continent, and the necessity of geographically-specific analyses of transnational mobilities., Queer and Trans African Mobilities crucially intervenes in queer migration studies and politics by fully accounting for the journeys of queer and transgender Africans on the African continent, to different continents and countries, and on digital platforms. By centering queer and trans Africans’ experiences with migration, mobility, and travel, this timely book demonstrates how migration studies and queer African studies can enrich one another., This gem of a collection thoroughly reorients our understandings of queer and trans migrations, mobilities, and movements within and from the African continent. It reframes how African nations, and queer and trans migrants, are imagined, conceptualized, and engaged. The authors provide innovative methodologies, epistemologies, and key questions for scholarship, activism, and policy-making. Read this groundbreaking book., Queer and Trans African Mobilities is bold and transformative in its challenging of our understanding of the intersections of gender, sexuality and mobility in Africa. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book is a worthwhile provocation and powerful reminder of how queer and trans mobilities in the continent are and should be imagined and theorized. The essays in this book push back against rigid interpretations of Africa and its peoples and the monolithic view that queer and trans Africans only move to the Global North to find more accommodating spaces. The book makes important contributions to the conceptions of border regimes as well as local, regional and global responses to queer and trans mobilities. Queer and Trans African Mobilities is a tour de force and a timely contribution to queer migration studies and queer African studies.

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).