Doctoral student Melissa Minor Peters (Northwestern University), with Dr. Karen Tranberg Hansen's guidance, will undertake research on how stigmatized physically and otherwise variant populations balance self-expression and self-preservation, particularly in public contexts. The research will be conducted in Kampala, Uganda. Kampala is one of the few African cities in which stigmatized people have formed visible communities despite significant risks, including verbal and physical attacks and loss of employment. Peters will use mapping, interviews, discourse analysis, and participant observation to study 1) the relation between her study participants' economic strategies and their presentations of self and identities; 2) how political, religious, and popular discourses in Kampala affect variant people; and 3) how variant people communicate identities.
The research is important because it will contribute to the integration of social science theory from political economy, identity studies, and research on health disparities. Findings from the research will aid work of human rights organizations that advocate for better treatment and more equal access to economic and other resources, such as those that might limit the spread of epidemic disease. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
This dissertation research examined the ways in which gender variant people (those whose gender differs from their birth sex) manage economic survival and queer gender/sexual expression in Kampala, Uganda. Kampala is one of the few African cities in which gender variant people have formed a visible community—yet noticeable gender/sexual nonconformity in this setting carries significant risks. Recently, the Ugandan Parliament introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009; if signed into law, the bill would sentence "repeat offenders" and those with HIV to death, among other provisions. Debate over the bill has heightened scrutiny of, and discrimination against, people perceived to be homosexual. This project studied how gender variant people living in Kampala manage gender performance and economic survival in a hostile setting. Using spatial mapping, interviews, photography, material analyses, and participant observation, I documented the multiple ways in which gender variant people navigated family expectations, economic survival, and mental and physical well-being. Field research revealed a dialectical relationship between performances of gender/sexual subjectivity and material conditions--including access to housing, finding and maintaining livelihoods, and avoiding violence. Research participants resisted social and economic marginalization through a broad range of economic strategies and modes of self-presentation. Important findings include: 1) Complex relationships exist among perceptions of class, public versus private, and safe versus unsafe in shaping performances of queer subjectivity across different spaces in Kampala. For example, middle-class research participants described slums as spaces that blur distinctions between public and private, and where everyday surveillance by neighbors endangers queer people. Yet for less privileged research participants, middle- and upper-class spaces entailed forms of surveillance and discipline, encoded in spatial organization such as security checkpoints and separate male/female bathrooms, that culminated in bodily experiences of vulnerability, harassment or violence. 2) Dress is a critical means through which gender variant people perform gender, sexual, and class identification. Gender variant females, in particular, have established a unique style of dress—yet one that is expensive to acquire and maintain. Besides marking themselves as masculine, it therefore signals class status—in a context where widespread poverty undermines many people’s ability to enact certain subject positions. Their fashions speak to the intimate associations between money and privileged forms of masculinity in contemporary Kampala. 4) The proliferation of NGOs in Uganda has had a profound effect on queer gender/sexual identification in Kampala. Funding for services such as HIV testing, support groups, and educational workshops institutionalize and lend meaning to particular subject positions, such as "transgender" or "MSM." Individuals may take up certain subject positions in order to gain access to targeted services. 5) In romantic/sexual relationships, identifications such as "butch," "femme," and even "transgender" must be understood as relational. Romantic and sexual relationships provided one practice through which interlocutors constituted these identifications and made them meaningful in everyday life. However, expectations of monogamy abraded uncomfortably against other notions of normative gendered and economic behavior—for example, the desire to achieve idealized adult masculinity by financially supporting multiple feminine partners. The intertwining of sexuality, love, economic support, and gender performance resulted in complex networks of sexual and romantic relationships that "queer" normative perceptions of both monogamy and "traditional" polygamy in Kampala. 6) In Kampala, gender variant people take up various identifications in the context of health services; meanwhile, health practitioners have difficulty carrying out research and interventions with populations whose identities do not conform to conventional or stable categories. This research calls into question how health practitioners identify, categorize, generate data about, and apply interventions to groups who manage multiple (and often conflicting or risky) subject positions. 7) Media depictions of violence against gender variant people in Uganda were often experienced as violating and violent in themselves. Research participants responded to "representational violence" by taking up media productions themselves. While some self-representation has been empowering, my research participants confronted difficult questions about how to publicize their concerns, without exploiting their own identifications and experiences of violence. Intellectual merit: Africanist scholarship has only just begun to engage with insights from queer theory and scholarship; meanwhile, queer studies tend to overlook ethnographic evidence from Africa. This research provides new insights into how gender variant people express gender nonconformity in a non-Western context, and expands existing scholarship in Anthropology, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and Political Economy to engage new ethnographic evidence. Broader impacts: An in-depth analysis of gender variance, its political economic context, and its material consequences lends itself directly to global conversations about the interplay of discrimination, stigma, and health risks. This research contributes to the work of human rights organizations, who advocate for better treatment and more equal access to the economic and health resources that limit violence, mental health risks, and the spread of HIV/AIDS.
