City Streets and Disco Beats: Recentring the Urban in Queer and Trans Migration Studies

Abstract

The last decade has seen significant scholarly interest in the cross-border movements of LGBTQ Africans. This work has helped spotlight the unique protection challenges facing these individuals, as well as the failure of governments, humanitarian bodies and UN agencies to provide adequate and appropriate support. However, by focusing so pointedly on the macro level, this scholarship overlooks key social and spatial dynamics. In this commentary, I reflect on what is lost when the urban is reduced to a narrative feature rather than a unit of analysis and show how (re)centring the urban can open up new avenues for theorising queer and trans displacement. Despite occupying tenuous social and legal positions, LGBTQ refugees continue to navigate and transform various urban locations. These everyday spatial negotiations deserve greater attention as they reveal much about how social exclusion operates, and is potentially resisted, in different moments and places.