Queer Fractures: Community-Building among LGBTQIA+ in Urban Namibia

Under the working title “Queer Fractures: Community-Building among LGBTQIA+ in Urban Namibia”, I am currently preparing for fieldwork between May 2025 and May 2026. Building on previous fieldwork encounters, in my doctoral research I want to examine socio-economic fractures within LGBTQIA+ communities in Namibia and their spatial manifestations in local urban landscapes. I am particularly interested in negotiation processes of belonging and actions that foster unity across fragmentation.

As “a scope of seeing”, the nearby offers both a theoretical and practical lens for approaching my research questions through the everyday spatial experiences of my research participants. While still a relatively open-ended concept, Biao Xiang’s nearby could help analyze how LGBTQIA+ in Namibia create alternative forms of proximity – through shared struggles, networks of support, and urban commoning practices – even when structural forces push them apart. Rather than being confined to geographical distance, the nearby could emphasize relational and social closeness, making it particularly useful for my project.

Anthropological Relevance

My research holds both practical and theoretical relevance and significance. It examines how communities build solidarity under challenging conditions while contributing to broader discussions on space, exclusion, and resilience in social anthropology. By linking urban anthropological debates on ‘the right to the city’, spatial justice, and urban commons with queer anthropological inquiries into the marginalization and community-building of sexual and gender minorities, my study bridges key disciplinary discussions.

Highlighting the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class, my research will deepen our understanding of how identities and social belonging are constructed and contested in postcolonial societies like Namibia, where the legacies of colonialism and apartheid continue to shape contemporary socioeconomic structures and the political-legal landscape affecting queer communities.

My research will besides inevitably concern how local queer communities rearrange now due to the external funding shock of previous major donors, such as USAID, withdrawing their support and thus, it speaks to very recent developments.

While queer anthropology is well established in anglophone academia, it remains largely marginalized in Germany. Through my research I aim to foster greater engagement with queer anthropological questions in German academia.