Navigating Urban Spaces as Queer Women in South Africa

Abstract

Occupying urban spaces for queer women, often shaped by implicit and explicit forms of regressive heteropatriarchy, has been understood as a challenge for queer women. As a result, queer women struggle to inhabit, live and feel safe in urban spaces. However, further scholarship is needed to consider how queer women may also find strategies to overcome such challenges. Such work can then add productively to, and right an imbalance within, existing scholarship on sexuality and urban space by exploring, acknowledging and giving voice to the lived experiences of queer women especially in urban Africa. Drawing on a PhD study that deployed in-depth interviews with 23 queer women, this intervention looks specifically at how black queer women have found creative ways to create communities with each other in challenging contexts, in the city of Johannesburg. This intervention shows how black queer women resist various forms of oppression by creating safe spaces for themselves (and others) within the city. An appreciation of these strategies by black queer women can then help further discussions as to how we come to understand how queer women occupy and make urban spaces their own through socialisation and support in ways that may also have applicability across the wider continent.

‘ONE WITH THE EARTH’: Mapping Solidarities for the (Un)Queering of Space in the Black Lesbian Journal Aché, 1989–1993

“…Zuziwe Khuzwayo explores the raced and gendered navigations of queer people in Johannesburg. 13 Nikki Lane describes the class-divided dance club spaces of Black queer women in Washington, DC. 14 In 1977, the Combahee River Collective-a Black feminist and lesbian advocacy group-defined identity politics as the political struggle emerging from their complex interests and experiences.…”

Interconnected Realities: Exploring the Interplay of LGBTQI Policies, Investor Behavior, ROI, Population Dynamics, Climate Change, and Africa's Firms

“…The process of rural-to-urban migration results in increased diversity and inclusivity within urban centers. Urban surroundings often exhibit a higher degree of inclusivity towards LGBTQI individuals, hence mirroring the evolving social dynamics of a transitioning population (Khuzwayo, 2023).…”

Geographies of gender and sexuality I: Engaging the shift towards Southern urbanism

“…With urban research long pointing towards the need to appreciate a wide diversity of ways in which we may come to frame politics in the urban South (Pieterse, 2005), researchers are now starting to consider the possibility of wide-ranging solidarities across various urban interests groups, due to potential shared concerns. Khuzwayo (2023), for example, has highlighted the remarkable similarities in the way women more generally and queer women in particular are exposed to very high risks of physical violence due to regressive and violent forms of heteropatriarchy in cities (and especially informal settlements) in South Africa. Research is also suggesting that same-sex community groups and women’s groups in these contexts can closely align for particular forms of political action (Gevisser, 2016) which may also echo wider regional and transnational solidarity movements across sites in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Bonner and Carré, 2013).…”