Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, K3.

The title of the seminar is We are Queer and We are Here. LGBT+ Rights, Visibility, and Sexual Identity among Young Queers in Kampala

It will take place on Wednesday, March 23 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

Here is an abstract for the seminar:

This research comes out of a project funded by Swedish Research Council in which we investigate visibility pressures connected to international aid cooperation in relation to LGBT+ rights in repressive contexts. The starting point is that queer visibility may constitute a potential danger in countries with homophobic legislation. One of the contexts we set out to study is Uganda, the poster boy of state-sanctioned homophobia since the infamous 2009 legislation, which among other things characterized Uganda as the world’s worst place to be gay in Western media. This has resulted in an explosion of funding for LGBT+ rights and organizations in the country. In this presentation I am  interested in what kinds of sexual identities are being forwarded with this funding mainly coming from the West? Peters (2014: 20) for example hint to that LGBT+ organizations in the country rather organize around a Western-based idea of sexual identity as core to the selfhood with its attached argument of sexual(ity) rights as human (individual) rights. So, while scholars long have underlined that the homo-hetero binary construction of sexuality is not always appropriate in non-Western contexts, several LGBT+ organizations in Africa have drawn on a human (individual) rights discourse (Amory, 1997). During a research trip to Uganda I therefore set out to understand the intersection of LGBT+ organizations, visibility of LGBT+ rights/ individuals/ groups, as well as how (mostly) unaffiliated non-open individuals with same-sex desires identified themselves, also in relation to the cause and the increasing number of organizations in the country.