Asserting queer agency online: A feminist inquiry into the experiences of queer women using instagram in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

This paper is a small scale feminist enquiry into the experiences of seven queer Kenyan women using Instagram to assert and navigate queer agency. The ways the existence of queer women in Kenya is subject to erasure, epistemically, symbolically and materially, is explored and highlighted how this can render queer women ‘unimagined’ in the now ‘democratic’ Kenyan regime. Queer women in Kenya are now reconfiguring social media spaces such as Instagram to push back on erasure and assert their existence. Drawing upon postcolonial feminism, this study shows that spaces like Instagram are locations where these women are making themselves ‘visible’ and ‘reimagined’.