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Christina Research Seminar: Gender refugees’ & the South African asylum regime: “there is no queue for gender change”
Tuesday 23rd April at 16-18
Lecture hall C120, Unioninkatu 38 (University of Helsinki, Topelia)
B Camminga (postdoctoral fellow, South African Centre for Migration & Society, Witts University): Gender refugees’ & the South African asylum regime: “there is no queue for gender change”

South Africa is the only country on the African continent that not only recognizes but also constitutionally protects and offers asylum to transgender-identified individuals. On entering the country, an individual has fourteen days to report to a Refugee Reception Office and apply for asylum. To access a center, asylum seekers are required to queue. Faced with two separate lines, one for men and one for women — much like the issues surrounding transgender access to public bathrooms— gender refugees approaching the South African state for asylum are immediately forced to make a choice. This queue also creates the conditions for surveillance, particularly as different regions are serviced on different days, which brings together the same asylum seekers from similar regions on the continent. This can make life for those who access affirming healthcare in South Africa doubly exposing, as they possibly move between queues witnessed by local communities. Drawing on research carried out between 2012 and 2016 with transgender identified refugees and asylum seekers or ‘gender refugees’, living in South Africa, B Camminga questions the necessity of an ever-ubiquitous system of sex/gender identification in the lives of asylum seekers. They also consider the current developments internationally, regionally, and locally in relation to the development of third- gender categories, “X” category passports, the suppression of gender markers, and wider debates about the removal and necessity of sex/gender identifiers on documents and their impact.

Bio
B Camminga (they/them) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of Wits, South Africa and the GIGA/UFS Young African Scholars Award Runner Up for 2018. Their work considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North and the physical embodied journeying of African transgender
asylum seekers globally. Their research interests include: transgender rights, migration, asylum and diasporas; bio/necropolitics, notions of privacy & the bureaucratisation of sex/gender; and the history of ‘trans phenomena’ in South Africa. Their book Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies over Borders and Borders over Bodies will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Some of their most recent publications include:

Camminga, B. 2018. ‘Shifting Borderlands – (Trans) “Gender Refugees” Moving to and through an Imagined South Africa’. Dutch Journal of Gender Studies Special Issue: Trans*: Approaches, Methods and Concepts 21 (1) 359-378.

Camminga, B. 2018. ‘“Gender Refugees” in South Africa – The “Common Sense” Paradox’. Africa Spectrum 53 (1): 89–112.

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Christina Research Seminar is an open advanced seminar focused around interdisciplinary gender studies chaired by Professor Tuija Pulkkinen. The seminar is organized by Gender Studies (University of Helsinki) and is currently a part of the doctoral programme of Gender, Culture and Society (SKY). For the future programme and more information, please see here

SKY Courses are organized regularly in different fields of multidisciplinary gender studies. Courses are held mainly in English and are organized both as thematic courses centered on a specific issue or author and as workshop-like courses concentrating primarily on individual PhD projects.
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23.04.2019 16:00-18:00
Seminar
Helsinki, Finland