(In)visible Lives: Exploring Lesbian Migrant Spaces of Belonging in South Africa
Abstract
This dissertation explores how and where lesbian migrant women living in South Africa feel a sense of belonging. Despite South Africa having legal and constitutional protections for sexual minorities and refugees, both groups of individuals face high amounts of homophobic and xenophobically motivated persecution. Little work has explored the unique challenges that migrants who are also sexual minorities can face as a result of their intersecting identities, and this is particularly true for work that looks at the lives of lesbian migrants.
With principles of narrative inquiry serving as methodological guidelines, this study uses interviews and solicited sketch maps from fourteen self-identified lesbian and bisexual migrants to examine where in the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg these women live, work, relax, and form relationships. It explores how structural barriers rooted in homophobia and xenophobia intersect to exclude them from establishing livelihoods and everyday routines, and from finding spaces of belonging. It also looks at where they feel safe (or not) and what their levels of comfort in different places can tell us about the emotional aspects of belonging. Lesbian migrants’ levels of comfort in different spaces are rooted in the comfort of others, and so this thesis lastly analyzes how they manage other people’s perceptions of their identity to create spaces of inclusion. Findings show that lesbian migrants experience oppression and discrimination at intersecting, multiscalar levels, thus rendering microscopic the sites and spaces in which they feel they belong. The difficulties they face in accessing and sustaining economic livelihoods, finding places where they can feel wholly safe, and the constant need to be mindful of the emotions of others produces a landscape of exclusion and unsafety, and renders lesbian migrant women as perennial outsiders.
The findings contribute to existing work on queer migration studies. A focus on the (South) African context demonstrates the plurality of sexualities and how different identities can lead to different levels of social acceptance. They also add to literatures on migration studies in South Africa by highlighting how sexuality itself can impact migrants’ senses of belonging, as well as their identity formation, levels of safety, and means of emotional management and expression.