Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on embodied experiences of (transient) ethnographic fieldwork to interrogate Kampalan nightclubs as spaces for the expression and negotiation of racialized masculinities and femininities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes the transient nature of ethnographic fieldwork as a starting point to interrogate nightlife practices in Kampala, Uganda, and the racialized transnational masculinities and femininities they produce.

European expatriates engage in Kampalan nightlife in ways shaped by their mobility as a transient class, and their negotiation of racialized, postcolonial gender identities. Drawing on observational data and autoethnographic experiences as a white European participating in Kampala’s nightlife during my doctoral fieldwork, I contribute to debates on race, sexuality, and the erotic economy (Rubenstein, 2004) within ‘global nightscapes’ (Farrer, 2011; Jankowski, 2018; Tutenges, 2022). I examine how sexuality and gender are navigated in these spaces, particularly by expatriates positioned as both connected to and distanced from life ‘at home’ in Europe. Through thick ethnographic description of arrival at, participation in, and departure from the effervescent Kampalan nightclub, I analyse how these spaces, while reinforcing class and postcolonial racial divisions, also enable expatriates and middle-class Ugandans alike to subvert hierarchies, challenge gender norms, imagine alternative futures, and cross boundaries through sexual intimacy. Reflecting on my positionality in relation to - and (measured) participation within - this erotic economy, I confront how ‘knowledge of the West’ generates new desires in others in the postcolonial present. Overall, this paper seeks to illuminate the anthropologist's participation in erotic economies as generative for understanding sexuality and gender relationally and contextually in her field site, of particular importance when, like myself, we engage in research more broadly concerned with local politics of gender.