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Going out and making it home: on the roots, routes and homing of young queer men in Nairobi, Kenya

Going out and making it home: on the roots, routes and homing of young queer men in Nairobi, Kenya Abstract Public imagination and academic scholarship present queer migrants as being uprooted due to their embodiment of non-normative sexual identities. Drawing from ethnographic research with a male sex worker-led organisation (SLO) in Nairobi, including 41 in-depth interviews with members, this paper explores this perceived uprootedness by highlighting Kenyan queer migrants’ multi-layered and multi-dimensional social experiences of home. Using the concept of ‘homing’, the paper explores the men’s lifelong efforts to feel at home, and the embeddedness of queer identities in this process. The SLO generates feelings of safety, acceptance and recognition and provides a ‘second home’ in the city. In the process of creating ties with chosen families in the city, the men still maintain close ties with family back in their villages, while economic opportunities induce back-and-forth mobilities. The men’s individual trajectories might fluctuate yet still fit within a more linear route in which they aspire to acquire land and properties in their ancestral homeland. The analysis of queer homing supports a reimagining of queer people’s mobilities that stresses their embeddedness in society and illustrates how it relates to the ‘queering’ of queer in the African context. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Mobilities Taylor & Francis

Going out and making it home: on the roots, routes and homing of young queer men in Nairobi, Kenya

Mobilities , Volume 18 (3): 15 – May 4, 2023
15 pages

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References (58)

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ISSN
1745-011x
eISSN
1745-0101
DOI
10.1080/17450101.2022.2146526
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Public imagination and academic scholarship present queer migrants as being uprooted due to their embodiment of non-normative sexual identities. Drawing from ethnographic research with a male sex worker-led organisation (SLO) in Nairobi, including 41 in-depth interviews with members, this paper explores this perceived uprootedness by highlighting Kenyan queer migrants’ multi-layered and multi-dimensional social experiences of home. Using the concept of ‘homing’, the paper explores the men’s lifelong efforts to feel at home, and the embeddedness of queer identities in this process. The SLO generates feelings of safety, acceptance and recognition and provides a ‘second home’ in the city. In the process of creating ties with chosen families in the city, the men still maintain close ties with family back in their villages, while economic opportunities induce back-and-forth mobilities. The men’s individual trajectories might fluctuate yet still fit within a more linear route in which they aspire to acquire land and properties in their ancestral homeland. The analysis of queer homing supports a reimagining of queer people’s mobilities that stresses their embeddedness in society and illustrates how it relates to the ‘queering’ of queer in the African context.

Journal

MobilitiesTaylor & Francis

Published: May 4, 2023

Keywords: Queer homing; mobilities; queer men; sex work; Kenya; COVID-19

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