Trans Masculine Geographies: On Navigating Urban Spaces and Negotiating Liveable Lives in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa

This dissertation is a qualitative, life history/narrative study that explores how 19 adult trans masculine people living in different urban areas around Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa navigate and negotiate liveable lives in the spaces and places they live and move in. This study draws from the theoretical and analytical traditions of feminist geographies, queer phenomenology, black trans feminism and the analytic of racial capitalism. To this end, this study brings forth a critical analysis of urban subjectivities and urban spatialities and traces the rhythm, textures and contours of trans masculine lives and how gender, space, class, race/ism, and sexuality shape the conditions of their possibility and emergence within the two cities. The cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town are hailed for their extensive historical and contemporary formations of queer and gender non-normative socialities. Through narrative analysis, this study shows how the classed and racialised gender-sexuality-spatiality formation marking the topography of the two cities animates the discursive and material constitutions of trans masculinities. Further, the discursive and material conditions variably permit trans masculine lives and complicate the emergence and visibility of trans masculinities, particularly those that do not lend themselves to normative registers of gender and sexuality. Further, this study shows how trans masculine people strategically commit to expressions and practices of masculinities depending on the spatial context of their movements. These strategies make possible the safe negotiation and passage in different social spaces of the cities. Finally, this dissertation emphasises how spaces, places, and gender subjectivities become and are continually re/produced through practicing and embodying otherwise forms of being. Specifically, through the insistence on nurturing forms of sociality that displace the racialised gender and sexuality binary as the authoritative grammar and syntax for knowable and legible life.

This study is a life history inquiry of trans urban spatial experiences that draws from the complex and unfolding life histories/narratives of 19 adult trans masculine people living in urban neighbourhoods in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. From their vantage points, I explore the socially produced imaginary and lived urban geographies of the two cities and how trans masculine people create and articulate liveable lives within them. Guiding this inquiry and analysis is the main question: how do trans masculine people living in urban areas around Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, navigate and negotiate liveable lives in the spaces and places in which they live and move? This dissertation engages with and responds to the need for more critical studies that analyse track how urban trans and gender non-normative lives unfold within wider processes of subjectivation and overdetermination.