Queering Borders: Negotiating Subjectivities in Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp

While important advances have been made towards queer visibility and acceptance on the African continent, queer lives are frequently marked as criminal and dangerous. The fact that same-sex sexual activities are criminalized in 32 of the 54 African nations-the death penalty in three-serves as a salient reminder of this. As long as countries and communities continue to criminalize and discriminate against queer persons, refugee protection will thus remain essential and, in many ways, continue to be one of the only ways of ensuring the rights of queer persons and groups on the continent. However, while queer claimants can seek asylum based on their sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE), the process of legitimising their claim through their lived experiences poses several challenges. Despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) acknowledgement that claimants' experiences are not necessarily translatable into western terminology, for example, the use of 'LGBTI' is still normatively preferable. The legitimacy of refugees' claims may thus depend on their ability to negotiate and translate lived experiences into a recognizable (western) lexicon. Whilst the western discourse of gender and sexuality is currently the dominant means through which the protection of queer refugees is understood, this thesis contends that a more contextualised politics of queer empowerment is possible and, in many cases, more effective.

With this in mind, this thesis aims to decentre stable definitions of sexual orientation and gender identity, focussing on Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp, by shifting attention to how they are lived. It does so, guided by an emphasis on the argument that amplifying the experiences of queer refugees in the global South is vital for finding viable solutions to current challenges. The methodological approach of this thesis is qualitative and guided by the daily experiences of queer refugees in Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp. The research methods will be experiential in design, drawing on photovoice, problem-centred interviews, and focus group sessions. By inviting refugees to document their experiences through photography, they could wield greater decision-making power over the representation of their subjectivities. . In addition, both problem-centred interviews and focus group sessions will be conducted and analysed using a decolonial lens. Texts written by Ngugi, Spivak, Oyewumi, and Lugones, amongst others, will provide strategies for how to do decolonial research. The aim of this research is not only to recognise the plurality of gender and sexual expression, therefore, but also to acknowledge the importance of conceptualising representations of queer refugees beyond the normative confines of western ontologies. In this way, this thesis seeks to provide a more complex, decolonial picture of resistance and self-representation and productively expose the limited scope of human rights discourse when addressing queer refugees.

Keywords
Queer, Migration, Refugee, decolonial thought, epistemologies of the South, Eurocentrism, imagination, ontology, reality, sociology.