Queer theory offers new views on daily life - even on infrastructure projects in Kenya

• I’ll confess I’ve raised quite a few eyebrows when I’ve told people about my research linking queer theory and infrastructure development.
• Queer theory is mainly associated with the study of gender, sexuality and queer lives.
• But in my new study, I show how my reading of queer theory highlights the complexities of people’s lives.

Abandoning preconceptions

• Since the early 1990s, as a specialised field of knowledge, queer theory has come to have multiple and often competing meanings.
• One of the central tensions has been the question of identity – how a subject understands her place in a world that is not of her own making.
• That is, as soon as a person describes themselves, or “comes out” as “queer”, they normalise identity as something that is fixed.
• In this sense, radical queer theory approaches identity as not something who we are but as something that happens to us.

Conflicting dynamics

• As stories in my research highlight, local fishermen dispossessed by the new port construction struggle to make ends meet.
• In this sense, infrastructure can be, and has been, understood as a form of structural and social violence that vulnerable populations are exposed to.
• But, as the story of local fishermen shows, it hasn't

  These conflicting dynamics can’t be neatly explained through identity categories that we use to make sense of ourselves and each other.

• But the contradiction remains – infrastructure development is both a kind of violence and an uncertain possibility of a better future.

Point of celebration

• The point, nevertheless, is not to fear this (un)knowability.
• It ought to be a reminder of our enduring responsibility to protect this (un)knowability – to let others be other.
• A point of celebration, a sort of pride if you will.