East African Queer and Trans Displacements

by John Marnell (Editor), B Camminga (Editor), Barbara Bompani (Editor), Kamau Wairuri (Editor)

Overview

Bringing together diverse case studies and interdisciplinary perspectives, this open access collection serves as the first in—depth examination of queer and trans displacement in East Africa. The collection features original creative works by queer and trans diasporic writers and artists with first—hand experiences of displacement.

The last decade has seen a sharp rise in state—sponsored homophobia and transphobia in East Africa.
This includes discriminatory legislation, such as the widely condemned Anti—Homosexuality Act in Uganda, and government—initiated crackdowns, such as the 'anti—gay taskforce' launched in Tanzania in 2018. The politicisation of sexual and gender rights in the region is often presented as a moral crusade (i.e. a return to traditional/family values) and is enacted with the support of many religious and cultural leaders. It is within this context that an ever—increasing number of LGBTQI+ people are leaving their homes and seeking protection elsewhere.

But East Africa cannot be reduced to a site from which LGBTQI+ displacement emanates. Several countries in the region act as either host countries or transit points, even as they produce LGBTQI+ refugees of their own. These complex social, political and legal dynamics make East Africa a productive site for theorising queer and trans displacement. The region offers insights into how, when and why LGBTQI+ Africans move, the social obstacles they face, and the different survival strategies they deploy. Despite this, research on East African queer and trans displacements remains sparse.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY—NC—ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350422025
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/16/2026
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Marnell is a researcher and PhD candidate at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand.

B Camminga is a Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender at the University of Bristol, UK and a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand, SA. Their work considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the term 'transgender' from the Global North and the physical embodied journeying of African transgender asylum seekers globally. They are the author of Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa (2019).

Barbara Bompani Barbara Bompani (she/her) is an Associate Professor in African History and Institutions at the University of Parma, Italy and honorary fellow at the Center of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Her research broadly focuses on religion, politics and development in Africa. In the past ten years, she investigated the relationships between sexuality and public religion, in particular conservative Christianity, in East Africa. She has published widely on these topics, and was co—editor of the volume Christian Citizens and the Moral Regeneration of the African State (2017).

Table of Contents

Introduction
John Marnell, B Camminga, Barbara Bompani & Kamau Wairuri 'East African Queer and Trans Displacements: Local Tensions, Regional Challenges and Global Implications'

New directions: Theories, methods and practices
Poem – Sam Adam, 'Estrangement (Ghorba)' (edited by Maneo Mohale)
1.Sam Adam, 'Converging Trails: Navigating queerness, Homeland and a Beyond—Binaries Explorations'
2.Stella Nyanzi, 'Deception and Evidence for Queer Exodus from Uganda: Reflexive Autoethnography'
3.B Camminga, 'Parallel Legal Regimes: Homotransnationalism, LGBTQI+ Refugees and a Failing International Protection System'
4.Miriam Gleckman—Krut, 'On Disembodied Details and the Lives they Imply: Archiving Queer Displacement in an African context'

Protection gaps: Violence, precarity and abandonment
Poem — Mihret Kebede, 'An Intimate Exile'
5.Gabriel du Plessix, 'Life in Limbo: Queer and Trans Encampment in Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp'
6.Neil J. W. Crawford, Katie McQuaid & Nath Niyitegeka, 'Climate and Environmental Injustices in Kampala, Uganda: Lived experiences of LGBTQI+ Refugees'
7.B Camminga, John Marnell & Emmy Manou, 'The Externalisation of Borders and Barbarism: Rwanda and the Return of the LGBT Question'
8.Kamau Wairuri & Mwangi Mwaura, '“It's not a Safe Haven or La La Land!” Queer refugees survival of State Policing in Nairobi'

3. Everyday life: Navigating social and spatial borders
Poem– Diriye Osman, 'I Bleed Black'
9.Barbara Bompani, 'From Sinner to “Un—Sinned”: Faith and Religious Experiences in the Everyday Life of LGBTQ+ Displaced People in Nairobi'
10.John Marnell, ' “I Sucked a lot of Dicks to Get this Place!” Home—making and Care Practices among East African LGBTQ Refugees'
11.Megan Douglas, ''This Is How I Am': Fashion, Agency and (In)visibility among Gay and Trans Ugandan Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Nairobi'

Epilogue
John Marnell & B Camminga 'Displacements in an Uncertain Future'

Editorial Reviews

East African Queer and Trans Displacements offers a critical and accessible analysis of international refugee policies when they confront national laws, regional transnational relationships, Christian fundamentalism, and climate change. Through an intimate portrait of asylum seekers' lives, the book invites scholars and practitioners to expand their scope of analysis and develop new and better supportive strategies for LGBTQI Africans.” —Anima Adjepong, University of Cincinnati, USA

“East African Queer and Trans Displacements is not just rigorous scholarship – it is testimony, archive, and act of resistance. This volume offers empirically rich analyses on displacement, belonging, protection, and everyday lives in exile, centering lived experiences of queer and trans people. At a time of increasingly dangerous conditions, this powerful book is an urgent and necessary contribution.” —Ulrike Krause, University of Münster, Germany

“Traversing the local to the national and the global, much like the journeying people whose stories are told within its pages, East African Queer and Trans Displacements capaciously and ambitiously fills a void in the scholarship on African migrations. By spotlighting the East African subregion, this methodologically diverse and theoretically illuminating book avoids the pitfalls of overgeneralization, while fulfilling the promise of specificity. It provides us the benefit of nuanced and highly contextualized dynamics of queer migration, teaching us larger lessons about displacement, emplacement, borders, identities, home, and the African condition.” —Olajumoke Yacob—Haliso, Brandeis University, USA

“East African Queer and Trans Displacements is an insightful testament to the resilience, creativity, and imagination of those who live at the margins of nationhood, gender, and belonging. Through personal narratives, incisive analysis, and creative writing, this book documents how queer and trans persons navigate displacement not only geographically, but socially and spiritually. Doing so, it offers a compelling portrait of queer fugitivity, not merely as a condition of exile but as a mode of being that resists erasure and asserts life beyond normative borders.” —Adriaan van Klinken, University of Leeds, UK

“This volume is nothing short of brilliant. It makes canonical contributions to the emergent field of the study of queer and trans displacement specifically, but also to broader multidisciplinary efforts seeking to sharpen scholarly conceptualization of displacement, its governance and its resistance. The volume illuminates the conditions of LGBTQI displacement and does so with close attention to the worldmaking agency of queer and trans refugees under conditions often tailored to erase their existence. Its contributions are many—challenging conventional portrayals, while nuancing the conceptualization of displacement, including to accommodate different practices of self—identification of those forcibly moved or immobilized. This is essential reading for anyone grappling with the meaning and reality of international borders and migration because of how it carefully maps the different ways of knowing, wielding and contesting borders among queer and trans displaced persons and communities in East Africa.” —E. Tendayi Achiume, Stanford University, USA, and University of Pretoria, South Africa

From the Publisher