Digital Borders, Diasporic Flows and the Nigerian Transgender Beauty Queen Who Would Not Be Denied

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B Camminga
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Beauty Pageant ◽  
Global North ◽  
Lgbt People ◽  
Tabloid Press

In 2011, Miss Sahhara, a transgender woman from Nigeria with UK refugee status, was crowned First Princess at the world’s largest and most prestigious beauty pageant for transgender women—Miss International Queen. The then Cultural Minister of Nigeria when contacted for comment responded that if she was transgender, she could not be Nigerian, and if she was Nigerian, she could not be transgender—a tacit denial of her very existence. In recent years, LGBT people “fleeing Africa” to the “Global North” has become a common media trope. Responses to this, emanating from a variety of African voices, have provided a more nuanced reading of sexuality. What has been absent from these readings has been the role of gender expression, particularly a consideration of transgender experiences. I understand transgender refugees to have taken up “lines of flight” such that, in a Deleuzian sense, they do not only flee persecution in countries of origin but also recreate or speak back to systems of control and oppressive social conditions. Some transgender people who have left, like Miss Sahhara, have not gone silently, using digital means to project a new political visibility of individuals, those who are both transgender and African, back at the African continent. In Miss Sahhara’s case, this political visibility has not gone unnoticed in the Nigerian tabloid press. Drawing on the story of Miss Sahhara, this paper maps these flows and contraflows, asking what they might reveal about configurations of nationhood, gender and sexuality as they are formed at both the digital and physical interstices between Africa and the Global North.

Attitudes Toward LGBT People and Rights in Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn M. Boryczka
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Global North ◽  
African Context ◽  
Lgbt People

Capturing the nuanced attitudes toward LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people and rights in Africa involves examining them from within and outside the African context. Constructions of the entire African continent as holding negative attitudes toward LGBT peoples and denying them any rights remain quite commonplace across the Global North. However, closer analysis of specific nation-states and regions complicates our understanding of LGBT people and rights in Africa. Advances in the global study of LGBT attitudes through tools such as the Global LGBTI Inclusion Index and the Global Acceptance Index survey African peoples’ beliefs about LGBT communities. These measures locate African attitudes about LGBT peoples within a comparative context to decenter assumptions and many inaccurate, often colonialist, constructions. Attitudinal measures also expose the gap between legislation securing formal rights and the beliefs driving peoples’ everyday practices. These measures further specify how African governments can, often in response to Western political and economic forces, leverage homophobia on a national level to serve their interests despite a misalignment with the population’s attitudes toward LGBT peoples. Nongovernmental organizations and advocates raise awareness about LGBT rights and issues to impact socialization processes that shape these attitudes to generate political, social, and economic change. A rights-based approach and research on attitudes emerging from the African context represent shifts critical to better understanding how LGBT peoples and rights can be more effectively advanced across the continent.

Gendering South Africa's Foreign Policy: Toward a Feminist Approach?

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Toni Haastrup
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
South African ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Global North ◽  
Domestic Level

Abstract South Africa's leadership has sought ethical foreign policy since the advent of democracy. This foreign policy outlook focuses on the African continent and includes certain articulations of pro-gender justice norms. In this article, I reflect on the extent to which South Africa's foreign policy embraces these norms as part of its foreign apparatus and practices. It takes at its starting point the nascent literature on feminist foreign policy applied to South Africa, which shares similarities to countries in the Global North that claim a feminist orientation to foreign policy. Moreover, it takes account of gender dynamics at the domestic level and how they are manifested in foreign policy discourses and practices, particularly in the understanding and implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, this article provides context and meaning for how gender concerns have evolved in South Africa's foreign policy, including the role of certain norm entrepreneurs in shaping the gender narrative. The article concludes that the domestic context is important to shaping and limiting how a country can enact feminist foreign policy. Importantly, the South African case provides a Global South dimension to the nascent scholarship.

scholarly journals Research From the Global South: The important role of context in international research activities

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-235
Author(s):  
Katie Bryant
Keyword(s):  
International Research ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
African Continent ◽  
African Region ◽  
The Past ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Global North ◽  
North And South

Researchers from various disciplines have become interested in the supposedly extreme differences in rates of research between academics situated in the Global North and South, specifically those on the African continent. Yet, having worked as a researcher and a writing coach in the context of one university in the southern African region for the past three years, I cannot identify with many of the explanations given for these differences in rates. So, by reflecting on two instances emerging from my own experiences as a researcher in this particular context, this Note from the Field discusses the important and critical role context needs to have in making sense of this phenomenon.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Queering Gender Identity Work: A Life History of a Black Transgender Woman

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esethu Monakali
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This article offers an analysis of the identity work of a black transgender woman through life history research. Identity work pertains to the ongoing effort of authoring oneself and positions the individual as the agent; not a passive recipient of identity scripts. The findings draw from three life history interviews. Using thematic analysis, the following themes emerge: institutionalisation of gender norms; gender and sexuality unintelligibility; transitioning and passing; and lastly, gender expression and public spaces. The discussion follows from a poststructuralist conception of identity, which frames identity as fluid and as being continually established. The study contends that identity work is a complex and fragmented process, which is shaped by other social identities. To that end, the study also acknowledges the role of collective agency in shaping gender identity.

Narratives of Queer Migration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gray ◽  
Mike Baynham
Keyword(s):  
The European Union ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Depth Migration ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Global North ◽  
Economic Necessity ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

This chapter considers the phenomenon of queer migration from a linguistic perspective, paying particular attention to the constitutive role of spatial mobility in narrative and its role in the construction of queer migrant identities. The chapter begins by looking at the way in which queer migration has been discussed in the literature and then moves on to address three different types of queer migration in greater depth: migration within national borders from the village/countryside to the city; migration between cities in member states within the context of the European Union; and finally, asylum-seeking within the context of migration from the Global South to the Global North. The chapter concludes by suggesting that queer migration is a complex phenomenon in which the intersection of sexuality, gender identity, desire, affect, abjection, economic necessity, class, politics, and fear for one’s life combine in ways that are unique in the lives of individual migrants.

“In the Bible Belt:” The role of religion in HIV care and prevention for transgender people in the United States South

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 102613
Author(s):  
Darius Scott ◽  
Nastacia M. Pereira ◽  
Sayward E. Harrison ◽  
Meagan Zarwell ◽  
Kamla Sanasi-Bhola ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hiv Care ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
United States South ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Role Of Religion

Capital Switching and the Role of Ground Rent: 1 Theoretical Problems

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
R J King
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Rent Extraction ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Speculative Investment ◽  
Capital Switching

The flow of both productive and speculative investment into housing relates to the state of capital accumulation in other economic sectors, as hypothesised in the ‘circuits of capital’ argument, but it also relates to the incentive to ‘switch’ investment into and out of housing, and therefore to expectations of ground rent and the (changing) social conditions that enable ground rent extraction. This is the first of three papers in which the relationships involved in these processes are explored. A series of theoretical problems arising from the argument are dealt with, principally relating to its seeming economic determinism and to an inappropriately narrow treatment of crisis and social change. In the subsequent papers, in this journal, these various ideas will be used to reflect on housing market and related social change in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1980s.

scholarly journals Desiring the Secular: Capital, Cohesion, and the Fantasy of Secularization

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Ian A. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Religious Subject ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Public Sphere

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.

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