C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Gender and sexuality (queer anthropology), intra-community differences, community and subcultural spaces, activism, social relations in urban landscapes, same-sex intimate partner violence
Research Area(s)
Namibia
Profile
I am a PhD candidate in the Department Anthropology of Economic Experimentation and a member of the working group Urban Anthropology of the Nearby, led by Christoph Brumann. I hold a bachelor's degree in social anthropology and educational science from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and a master's degree in gender studies from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
One of my previous research topics was the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on queer activism in Namibia. Spatiality became a central theme when I observed how LGBTQIA+ activists created spaces, such as drag nights, to counter the isolation and hardship faced by sexual and gender minorities after the few spaces they had to meet before the pandemic were closed and community outreach was discontinued. At the same time, these artistic attempts to create “safer spaces” for the entire community remained inaccessible to large sections, partly due to their location in the urban centre of Windhoek and the unequal distribution of financial resources. On the other hand, I was once taken by local queers to a shebeen in the informal settlements on the outskirts of the Namibian capital, which they claimed was “gay-friendly”. Nothing suggested this apparent gay-friendliness of the place, but while I was nervous and expecting hostility, my companions, some of them visibly trans women, seemed comfortable, and my negative expectations were not fulfilled.
During my field research for my master's, I returned to Namibia to investigate same-sex intimate partner violence in the country after the topic received some attention when an amendment to the local domestic violence act in 2022 did not end the explicit exclusion of same-sex relationships from the protections afforded by the law, as hoped by activists and community advocates. Although I interviewed several research participants who had experienced various types of abuse in their queer relationships, the topic was not typically discussed much in their communities. I was intrigued by the oppressive silence around same-sex intimate partner violence and researched its origins and how it impacts survivors' responses to abuse. I could further observe significant class divisions within local communities, with a small group of well-educated, mobile queer activists seemingly standing out from the majority. While some queer activists and advocates regularly meet at conferences in hotels across the country and sometimes even abroad to discuss the challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ people in Namibia, I also encountered critical voices in the field, who refer to these conferences as “hotel activism” that does not bring about change for the community as a whole.
All these different spaces – hotels, drag nights, shebeens – carry notions of the nearby of community belonging, but also of class. Based on my previous encounters, my doctoral research seeks to examine these socio-economic fractures within local LGBTQIA+ communities from the perspectives of social anthropology, queer economics and urban theory in order to understand their cultural and intersectional complexity, as well as their spatial reflection in the urban landscape. Focusing on these fractures prevents viewing queer Namibians as homogeneous, but instead provides a nuanced understanding of local LGBTQIA+ diversity that expresses itself in the spaces frequented by members of the community.