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Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic analysis of communities of queer women in Senegal, I show how queer kin formations create spaces for queer futures to materialise as women confront urban material precarity, growing homophobia and the challenges of living with family as a collective.

Paper long abstract:

In a context of rising homophobia, what forms does queerness take in Senegal? How do women oscillate between silence and speaking up, when building their queer futures? I use Diabate’s (2020) concept of naked agency to explore ethnographically how women question heteropatriarchy and social injustices from positions of vulnerability. Analysing women’s critical agency that is distinct and distant from queer activism and a growing visibility of feminist activism in the Senegalese public sphere, I demonstrate how leisure spaces emerge where women can play with gender- and kin conventions as a way to shape their futures. Central to understanding how these women’s naked agency takes shape, are their practices of kinship. Navigating the violence and possibilities that kinship produce (Bradway and Freeman 2022), women confront urban material precarity, growing homophobia and the challenges of living with family as a collective. In their collective attempts to create liveable lives for themselves, they develop, transmit and reveal a savoir-vivre in the interstices between loud anti-queer debates on the one hand and discretion and indirection on the other hand. Their savoir-vivre is built upon elusiveness and transience rather than fixed identities, with particular queer but ever-changing linguistic praxis; flexible housing arrangements and multiple spaces and networks to tap into. The result is a challenge to the heteropatriarchal state by making queerness visible in a playful, collaborative, non-identitarian way.