Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa

This book tracks the conceptual journeying of the term 'transgender' from the Global Northwhere it originatedalong with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national homes, institutional frameworks and imaginaries. This study centres on the experiences and narratives of people that can be usefully termed 'gender refugees', gathered through a series of life story interviews. It is the argument of this book that the departures, border crossings, arrivals and perceptions of South Africa for gender refugees have been both enabled and constrained by the contested meanings and politics of this emergence of transgender. This book explores, through these narratives, the radical constitutional-legal possibilities for 'transgender' in South Africa, the dissonances between thepossibilities of constitutional law, and the pervasive politics/logic of binary 'sex/gender' within South African society. In doing so, this book enriches the emergent field of Transgender Studies and challenges some of the current dominant theoretical and political perceptions of 'transgender'. It offers complex narratives from the African continent regarding sex, gender, sexuality and notions of home concerning particular geo-politically situated bodies.

Makes the case that 'transgender', as a discourse and a politics, has materialised in South Africa in particular forms due to a combination of social, political and cultural conditions peculiar to the country Provides the first in depth study of the lives of transgender refugees and asylum seekers from the African continent living in South Africa Argues that the materialisation of 'transgender' in South Africa, in recent years, has lead to the emergence of what can be usefully termed 'gender refugees'people who can make claims to refugee status, fleeing their countries of origin based on the persecution of their gender identity

Auteur

B Camminga is Postdoctoral Fellow at the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa. Their research interests include: transgender rights, migration, asylum and diasporas; necropolitics, notions of privacy & the bureaucratisation of sex/gender; and the history of 'trans phenomena' in South Africa.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Trans Travels and Trans Trajectories.- 2. The Echo of the 'Knowing Subject': Trans Methodologies in South Africa.- 3. The Emergence of a Discourse of Transgender in South Africa.- 4. The Politics and Limits of Transgender in South Africa.- 5. Shifting Borderlands and Becoming a Gender Refugee.- 6. Of Categories and Queues and Structural Realities.- 7. Finding Community, Finding Rights: The Common Sense Paradox.- 8. The Journey does not end. It's a life time journey.