Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper applies a feminist-materialist analytical approach to unpack the tensions that exist in sustaining queer livelihoods between collective organising, forms of public representation and framing of queerness as heritage.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Cape Town advertises as a destination for queer tourists and travelers, given the specificity of the South African constitution and its game changing inclusion of queer rights at the end of the apartheid regime. Yet, being queer in Cape Town is a different matter to visiting the city as a tourist and queer livelihoods make lines of division that continue to exist in South African society visible, as recently described by South African scholars such as b camminga or Zethu Matebeni (2023). This paper unpacks the intersection of making a living as a queer person in Cape Town, public ways of displaying queer existences as a brand (such as through PRIDE) or heritage (such as in the art market and museums), and access to spaces that form the material basis for both of the above. Applying a feminist-materialist lens to ethnographic observations, I look at ways of being queer in Cape Town as sites of tension. Instead of a ‘queer community’, there exist manifold differentiated queer communities that do not necessarily have much to do with one another. With a growing hyper-capitalization of queer forms of public representation and an awareness of queerness as a localized (South African) brand, the tension lies in a constant negotiation of sustaining a livelihood by making use of opportunities provided in this field versus providing care for chosen family and other queers or re-appropriating places for a different kind of public representation of queer lives.

Paper short abstract:

Spatial inequalities among queer individuals, rather than as an intersection of space and queerphobia, are examined as an integral part of social reproduction and differentiation processes that involve temporality, spatiality, and linguistic differences, as well as class and value.

Paper long abstract:

Queer lives and experiences, even within a single nation-state, display such a diverse range and inequalities that merit analyses of how gender and sexual diversity embody or produce diversity within itself. While intersectional perspectives have produced mostly lines of research that study separate axes of oppression (McNally, 2017), social reproduction theory-informed studies have highlighted the co-constitution of said axes as part of systemic realities in which class and the role of labour power are key components, if not the most relevant ones (Bhattacharya, 2017; Mezzadri, 2019; Jaffe, 2020). From this vantage point, territorial or spatial inequalities among queer individuals are to be understood as an integral part of how sexual and gendered hierarchies are (re)produced along spatial borders, and not as the simple intersection of queerphobia and space. This paper draws from current debates on how gender and sexuality relate to social reproduction theory (Sears, 2017), value theory (Hennessy, 2013), and the role of time and space (Rao, 2020) to inform the analysis of both quantitative and ethnographic data of spatial inequalities among queer people in Spain. Diversity and inequalities are analysed against a wider perspective than that offered by identity politics, whereas the specific role of linguistic diversity within Spain is studied as an integral part of how queer lives are reproduced. Rather than as a direct intersection of space and queerphobia, these inequalities and hierarchies are seen as part of “variegated geographies of social reproduction” (Bakker & Gill, 2019) or a “combined and uneven social construction” (Drucker, 2000).

Paper short abstract:

This piece explores how the discourses of Ghanaian political elites surrounding LGBT rights and restrictions differ in national and global arenas. I investigate calculations, tacit conventions and mateiral consequences that make some utterances unspeakable in one setting, and obligatory in others.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021, numerous watershed moments amplified a growing sense of anti-LGBT* sentiment in Ghana. The NGO LGBT+ Rights Ghana’s Office was forcibly shut down by police; 21 lesbian bisexual queer and intersex women and trans advocates were arrested during a workshop on human rights; and Parliament introduced a bill that punishes LGBT*-related identities, cultural productions, and solidarities. The bill was written mainly by the opposition party of the present government. Some consequently suggest ulterior motives behind its introduction. In theory, its assent into law would cast the present administration in a negative light in the eyes of wealthy pro-LGBT* governments and institutions that provide significant aid to Ghana. Its rejection, however, would make the government appear compromised in the eyes of Ghanaian voters and weaken the party’s prospects in the upcoming election.

The opposition may therefore be playing on the vulnerabilities of what Kóczé & Rövid would refer to as ‘double discourse’ (2017) where political elites mobilize different ‘faces’ or discourses in different political arenas. As my field research demonstrates, political elites may appear lukewarm or pro-LGBT at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, while propagating anti-LGBT animus at home. I investigate the political economy of decorum in Ghana and ask what rational calculations and tacit conventions render some utterances unspeakable in one setting, and obligatory in others. I further explore the material consequences of this calculus.

Works Cited

Kóczé, A., & Rövid, M. (2017). Roma and the politics of double discourse in contemporary Europe. Identities, 24(6), 684–700. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1380338

Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on research conducted during the covid-19 pandemic period in the city of Bologna, Italy, looks at queer mutual aid initiatives and uses feminist theory around social reproduction and care to emphasize both the material dimension of queer care and the complicated affects it entails.

Paper long abstract:

By engaging with feminist theory around care concerning both social reproduction as well as ethics of care I will explore how queer mutual aid initiatives in Bologna, Italy, during the pandemic can shed new light on the materiality of queer life and affects.

I will discuss queer mutual aid, often discursively presented in strict opposition from charity and top-down care, as complex and imperfect in practice, yet still fundamental for the survival of queer networks. By looking at the complex affects that queer care can move, as well as at its limitations and slippages, I hope to shed light on the ambivalence of care from a queer perspective.

I will present the importance of queer mutual aid in relation to political revendications for welfare changes, as well as the discursive importance queer mutual aid has in highlighting the material dimension of queerness and the political role of care in social movements, often overshadowed and denied. Moreover, while in social movements care can often be devalued and overlooked, in the context of queer mutual aid and the pandemic, care re-emerges more clearly as central to life. I will give space to collective counter-narratives of care, countering the unfortunate association between care and repression that emerged during the lockdown periods, without losing sight of care still being a field of contention, power struggles, exploitation, and value extraction. I aim to analyse precisely this ambivalent nature of care as enacted in queer mutual aid initiatives.

Paper short abstract:

Male-born geis in Dar es Salaam have one avenue of social status: women’s life-cycle celebrations. Data: 103 interviews with geis (2021-2022). While geis are shunned for not reproducing, in exchange for social inclusion they invest in multiple ways in the social reproduction of female party hosts.

Paper long abstract:

The queer identities of the 103 male-born persons I interviewed known as geis (also shoga, kuchu) defy Western labels (1% homosexual, 34% transgendered, and 60 % ‘in between male and female’). The city of Dar es Salaam needs the cheap labour of the very poor but does not need to pay for their social reproduction due to continual in-migration from rural areas. Many city residents can barely survive and reproduce themselves. Most geis live in poverty and obtain their income from sex work. Of those I spoke with, 90% did not use money for their own biological reproduction and did not expect to live past their mid-30s due to HIV/AIDS. They were excluded from jobs, housing, mistreated by medical practitioners and police, and seen to bring ‘bad luck’. Yet they had one avenue of social inclusion and status: attending local life-cycle celebrations organized by women. Why do women invite geis to their celebrations? Supplementary data: 59 interviews with non-geis and participant observation (2021-2022). I found that, by joking openly of sexual matters as MCs, by performing as titillating novelties who ‘danced better than women’ and attracted more gift-giving attendees, by giving gifts and mobilizing other geis in their networks to bring gifts, by participating in ‘destruction committees’ aimed at destroying a female rival’s celebration, and through gift exchanges that doubled in amount each celebration, geis brought in money that funded the social reproduction of the female hostess’ families. I introduce two new analytical concepts: social value niche and rivalrous incorporation.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss norms in UK birth cohort research and queer/ed study participants both erased and made marketable subjects under capitalist conditions. I pose the materialist possibilities of critical queer perspectives on relatedness and reproduction in this context.

Paper long abstract:

From the eugenics era to the present, the UK has a long history of engineering social and sexual citizenship through enlisting its population in biological and social research. ‘Normal’ human development therein has been coproduced by biomedical and cultural bias. While much discourse has shifted toward combatting those widespread inequities, queer and trans subjects often face the options of conformity or being disappeared in the data. Discussing observations from field research on an intergenerational birth cohort study in Bristol, I seek to highlight the hierarchies that coopt and benefit queer/ed middle-class birth cohort research participants. Limited options for quantifying ‘family’ on study questionnaires and lack of clarity regarding who ‘counts’ in research, literally in terms of statistics and figuratively in terms of value, means that queer families and non-genetic relatives ‘queered’ by boundaries of ‘the family’ within research, face erasure. Heteronormative constructions of relatedness and intelligibility prevail in a context where past and future family health can be distilled down to maternal causality, as Lappé and Jeffries Hein’s (2023) materialist work on placenta research reveals. On the other side of this, there is potential for the hypervisibility of ‘good’ queer subjects who may help ensure a study’s financial viability. I argue that crip and queer perspectives on assisted reproductive technologies, deconstructing invisibly selective relatedness, for example between identical twins and their genetic children, and a queer/trans anthropological approach to shared biophysical connection, what I term a queer ‘mesobiome,’ contribute to materialist biopossibility (Willey 2016) in the realm of social reproduction.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I analyse the life trajectory of a Brazilian transgender performer who worked in the 1970s in São Paulo’s night entertainment market and emigrated to Germany in 1980. I address conviviality, sexoticisation and futurity for gender non-conforming people in both countries.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I analyse the life trajectory of Andrea Brown, a Brazilian transgender performer who started her artistic career in São Paulo’s night entertainment market in the 1970s and emigrated to Germany in 1980. Back in her days in São Paulo, Ms Brown had access to prestigious spaces. She enjoyed relative job stability in a context of censorship, state-sponsored repression, and widespread violence, especially against gender non-conforming people. The police brutality and the economic hardships caused by the authoritarian regime pushed her to seek opportunities abroad. Apropos leaving the country, Ms Brown was mindful of the experiences of other colleagues and wanted to do things in the safest way possible. She contacted managers in Europe and received a positive reply from an agent in West Germany. In her transit, initially conceived as a short work period under temporary schemes, Ms Brown prioritised visas and contracts that allowed her to return to Brazil, albeit she never did. She arrived in a context of racialisation and exoticisation of black and brown-skinned people in German entertainment. Her Brazilianness entangled symbols associated with exoticism and sensuality. After 47 years on stage, Ms Brown retired to southern Germany, where she still lives. From her trajectory, I address the convivial configurations a dark-skinned transgender woman experienced in the authoritarian Brazil of the 1970s and the democratic conservative West Germany of the 1980s, analysing projects and futures she envisioned for herself.