Queer and Trans African Mobilities - Migration, Asylum and Diaspora Book

RELEASE DATE - 14 JULY 2022

Recent years have seen increased scholarly and media interest in the cross-border movements of LGBT persons, particularly those seeking protection in the Global North . While this has helped focus attention on the plight of individuals fleeing homophobic or transphobic persecution, it has also reinvigorated racist tropes about the Global South.

In the case of Africa, the expansion of anti-LGBT laws and the prevalence of hetero-patriarchal discourses are regularly cited as evidence of an inescapable savagery. The figure of the LGBT refugee – often portrayed as helplessly awaiting rescue – reinforces colonial notions about the continent and its peoples.

Queer and Trans African Mobilities draws on diverse case studies from the length and breadth of Africa, offering the first in-depth investigation of LGBT migration on and from the continent. The collection provides new insights into the drivers and impacts of displacement linked to sexual orientation or gender identity and challenges notions about why LGBT Africans move, where they are going and what they experience along the way.

"This urgent, compelling, and carefully curated volume is a vital corrective to the field of queer and trans migration studies. By de-centring an emphasis on legal regimes, Euro-American perspectives, and South-North migration trajectories, Queer and Trans African Mobilities fills gaps in knowledge and understanding that have existed for decades. As a whole, the essays in this book invite readers to expand their thinking on migration narratives, securitisation regimes, belonging, and what it means to think about queer Africa. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone who teaching about queer and trans migration, gender and sexuality on the African continent, and the necessity of geographically-specific analyses of transnational mobilities."
Karma R. Chávez, Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

"Queer and Trans African Mobilities crucially intervenes in queer migration studies and politics by fully accounting for the journeys of queer and transgender Africans on the African continent, to different continents and countries, and on digital platforms. By centring queer and trans Africans’ experiences with migration, mobility, and travel, this timely book demonstrates how migration studies and queer African studies can enrich one another."
Ashley Currier, Professor, University of Cincinnati, USA, author of Politicizing Sex in Contemporary Africa: Homophobia in Malawi (2019)

"This gem of a collection thoroughly reorients our understandings of queer and trans migrations, mobilities, and movements within and from the African continent. It reframes how African nations, and queer and trans migrants, are imagined, conceptualised, and engaged. The authors provide innovative methodologies, epistemologies, and key questions for scholarship, activism, and policy-making. Read this groundbreaking book."
Eithne Luibhéid, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Arizona