Restricted freedom: negotiating same-sex identifications in the residential spaces of a South African university

Abstract

International higher education research focused on students who claim same-sex identifications in university residential spaces has tended to prioritise the ‘gay as victim’ discourse, often leading to the pathologising of same-sex identification. While there is emerging research seeking to challenge this dimension of scholarship by offering a more nuanced and ‘queer’ approach to doing research, such research has tended to be thin, often exclusively focusing on Western contexts. This paper responds to this limitation by showcasing the experiences of Black South African same-sex-identifying students residing in student accommodation spaces in one South African university. Ten participants (five men and five women) were selected to participate in the study through snowball sampling. Each participant was interviewed twice using grounded conversations – an interview technique designed to address unequal power relations during the interviewing process. Findings highlight that the experiences of same-sex-identifying students at the university where this study took place are complex, involving the accommodation of homophobia and heteronormativity as well as resist-stancing. This is mainly due to the fact that the university residential space was heterosexualised. The paper, therefore, argues for a ‘queering’ of higher education scholarship given the deeply heterosexualised and misogynistic cultures that exist in such spaces.

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