Rethinking homocapitalism


Leverhulme Trust funded postdoctoral project exploring the links between LGBTQ+ rights, corporate power, and hierarchy across the global South with particular focus on Kenya, Brazil and Argentina. The project aims to generate new insights and theorisations into the relationship between homocapitalism and LGBTQ+ politics, with particular interest in how these rework understanding of progress and homophobia.

  • Tracing the homocapitalist investments in queer tourism and the growing incorporation of LGBTQ+ inclusion into the country’s tourist offer as a global brand, the research interrogates how different forms of access to queer mobility, liberation and economic privilege unfold across different zones of encounter within the landscape of queer tourism in Buenos Aires.

  • This research traces the circuits of discourse, desire and value through which corporate stances against ‘global homophobia’ are constituted in Kenya, with particular focus on “speculative fictions about the future” (Keeling 2019, 5) that sustain the ‘economic case’ for LGBTQ+ rights and how this intersects with broader world-making projects that aim to turn Nairobi into a city that is ‘open for business’.