Paper short abstract:

Strategic storytelling and media representations of violence against LGBT Kenyans are vital pathways between international norms and local practices. We argue that the grand narrative of Global LGBT solidarity overshadows the complex localized terrain where human suffering and rescue are negotiated.

Paper long abstract:

International LGBT institutional actors, and the streams of funding they afford, have been crucial in the assembly of transnational networks that advance LGBT rights concerns throughout Africa. Strategic storytelling and popular media representations that depict the human rights violations of LGBT Kenyans indeed have become a vital passageway between international norms and local practices. Analysing a series of transnationally-networked events, including Rights Out There; This is my Pride (Amsterdam); Out Film Festival and Upinde Awards (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Awards in Nairobi), highlights various modes of active resistance that form the basis for collective action.

We consider these events as solidarity performances that operate as crucial sites in the production and dissemination of ideas of 'being LGBT' in Kenya. Deploying various rhetorical technologies, these solidarity performances go beyond providing physical safe spaces for dialogue to take place. Rather, these sites open up vital spaces in which particular aesthetics of solidarity are rehearsed, rhetorical styles are honed and social media messaging is refined--all of which are amplified through film, art and storytelling, thus enabling Kenyan activists to express local priorities within global frames of reference. By analyzing such transnational connections and interventions, this paper critically examines the relationship between transnationally-supported LGBT networks and the grand narrative of solidarity. While these connections are made to link local realities to a particular global audience, these performances also challenge and unsettle the processes through which global agendas of dominant LGBT network allies take hold and are reproduced in Kenyan localities.