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Paper short abstract:

How may ethnography help us grasp queer future-making practices and activate their critical possibilities in a time when the rhythms of respectability have generally become ‘queer’ – unruly or out of line – and the state promises the securitization of intimacy and morality?

Paper long abstract:

On 17 May 2017, the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, the Goethe Institute in Nairobi displayed the work of six Kenyan artists in an exhibit provocatively named “To Revolutionary Type Love: A Celebration of Queer Love.” At the forefront of the exhibit was a remarkable collection of twenty-two kanga fabrics that called for affects and attachments that are more expansive and inclusive, more accepting of queerness. Turning a salient cultural object long wedded to nationalist imaginaries of tradition and ‘African morality’ into a medium of queer activism, artist Kawira Mwirichia, I suggest, set out to imagine a different sort of future.

Departing from the political art of Kenyan Kawira Mwirichia, in this chapter I explore how anthropologists may grasp queer future making practices, past and present and, through ethnography, activate their critical and transformative possibilities. How do queer futures materialize amid (or against) rising homophobic rhetoric and violence, or growing investment in the national utopia? How can such futures be manifested in a contemporary political economy so desperately invested in rescuing heteropatriarchal normativities? I suggest that it is precisely with a generalized sense that the rhythms of the life course, value, and respectability have become ‘queer’ – in the sense of unruly or out of line – that a fetishistic overinvestment in the promises of the security state becomes saliently resonant with people’s everyday struggles and concerns.