Hucke, ‘”For Me It Is Double Quarantine Inside”‘, 2022
- Category: Literature
- Source: Academic
- Subject: Sexual Orientation/Sexuality, Refugee/Asylum
- Place: Africa
- Year: 2022
- File: Migration_Asylum_and_Refuge_during_a_Pan
- URL: https://www.academia.edu/69522911/Migration_Asylum_and_Refuge_during_a_Pandemic_Perspectives_of_Migrants_Researchers_and_Practitioners?lctg=140673169
Verena Hucke, ‘”For Me It Is Double Quarantine Inside”: Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic – The Case of Lesbian Migrant Women in South Africa’, Refugee Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (2022) (pp. 101 ff).
Abstract
In the end of March South African president Ramaphosa declared the national state of disaster including a nationwide lockdown with a restrictive curfew in consequence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has a specific effect on (forced) migrants in South Africa. The consequences arising from the crisis unfold along the intersections of race, class, and citizenship as well as gender and sexuality. Informal migrants are confronted with the loss of livelihoods and often with a lack of provision of basic supplies, exacerbated through xeno- and – for lesbian migrant women – homophobia. Drawing on narratives conducted during the nationwide lockdown in Johannesburg in March and April 2020 with black lesbian migrant women the article examines the experiences of these women including the restriction of movement and how they reorganize their daily life and navigate the all-embracing condition of waiting. The article argues that the fracture of the Rainbow Nation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is intensified. The lack of access to save housing and protection from discrimination, the omitted inclusion of the experiences of lesbian migrant women explicitly in policy responses to mobility and the COVID-19 pandemic can lead to enforced quarantining – both from society and from their selfidentification.
Keywords
Quarantine, Waiting, Rainbow Nation, Lesbian Migrant Women, South Africa, COVID-19 Pandemic