Queering as (un)knowing: Ambiguities of sociality and infrastructure

Abstract

Putting queer theory in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, this article proposes a theoretically, methodologically and empirically expansive reading of queer epistemologies. Reiterating the expansiveness of queer theory as an intellectual and political endeavour, the article argues that queering might also be perceived, and engaged with, as a theoretical and practical concern with non-linear, ambiguous, never-fully-knowable textures of subjectivity, self and social life, such as those implicated in mega-infrastructure development. Exploring this, the article develops the case for approaching queering as (un)knowing – an epistemology to foreground ambiguities of the social – intended to build expansive forms of solidarity.

I Introduction

The arguments presented in this article are situated at an unfamiliar, even unusual, intersection – queer theory and critical infrastructure studies. First, the article proposes a new interpretation of queer theory that is undertaken without explicitly centring sexuality or normativity traditionally associated with queer studies as a theoretically and practically engaged body of knowledge. Doing this, the article makes the case for deploying queer theory to reckon with the intricacies and vicissitudes of social life within contemporary capitalism at large. As I discuss below, queer theory, deconstructing binary-based hierarchical orthodoxies of gender and sex, foregrounds the reciprocal constitution of the sexual and the social. As Liu (2015: 25) notes, ‘the future of queer studies depends on the promise that rethinking the sexual can lead to the rethinking of the social as well’ (also see Floyd 2009: 218; Warner 1993: x). Explicitly centring the social – or, what it means to be human in the world of not one’s making – explored within queer theory, but without an explicit focus on the sexual or the normative, the article marks one theoretically, methodologically and empirically expansive path for this queer future.

This reading of queer theory stands in stark contrast to Weber’s (2016) position that queer scholarship cannot count as queer if it has ‘no genuine interest in those who refuse/fail to signify monolithically in terms of sexes, gender, and sexualities’ (p. 16). In this sense, my main argument echoes recent Smith’s (2020) proposition that there is no ‘fixed referent’ for queer theory, in this way suggesting that queering as an intellectual endeavour should always remain open as ‘ever-shifting terrain of debate’ (ibid., 17). This, of course, echoes Sedgwick’s (1993) path-setting work that, having highlighted the fundamental openness of query theory, reverberated within the field at large (e.g. Eng 2010; Liu 2015; Puar 2007; Oswin 2008). Paradoxically, however, in spite of the multiple claims that queer theory ought to be understood as an ‘open mesh of possibilities’ (Sedgwick 1993: 8), a large part of queer theorising still ends up focusing on sexuality; whether its mercurial, non-normative expressions (Eng 2010; Floyd 2009; Liu 2015), its instrumentalisation in imperial, state violence (Puar 2007) or its key role in the historical development of capitalism (Smith 2020). This is also noticeable in geographical scholarship that, irrespective of queer theory’s openness, continues to tether queering to both implicit or explicit study of sexual textures of power (e.g. Gandy 2012; Heynen 2018; Mawdsley 2020; Oswin 2019) as I discuss below. On the other hand, when the sexual is explicitly decentred, queering has primarily meant ‘making differences visible and calling normative impulses and forms of social closure into question’ (Gibson-Graham 1999: 83; also Oswin 2008: 96; Peterson 2017: 114).

Building on this work – but, once again, reminding of queer theory’s openness – in the article, I propose the case for expanding queer theory beyond matters of (sexual) normativity. I write sexual in brackets to indicate that, even when queer theory is presented as a study of normativity, the sexual cannot be ontologically separate from normative economies of the social. With my reading of queer theory, I similarly do not suggest that sexuality or normativity can (or should) be disentangled from the social. Nevertheless, my proposition is that, whilst (sexual) normativities inevitably form a part of social life, we can productively do queer theory-inspired work without having to necessarily foreground them as the focus of a queer endeavour. In the article, I argue that this queer endeavour is not only about keeping queer as ‘permanently unclear, unstable and ‘unfit’ to represent any particular sexual identity’ (Nash and Browne 2010: 7–8). Nor that it only concerns questioning and deconstructing the very idea of normality that functions as social violence (e.g. Gibson-Graham 1999: 83; Oswin 2008, 96; Peterson 2017, 114). Instead, I propose that queering could also be perceived, and engaged with, as a theoretical and practical concern with non-linear, equivocal, never-fully-knowable textures of subjectivity, self and social life. I call this queering as (un)knowing – an epistemology and a method to foreground ambiguities of the social. In this sense, unlike Gibson-Graham (1999) who argue that ‘various forms of queerness are everywhere to be found’ (p. 83), my proposition is that queerness cannot be located as such but presents a praxis of radical (un)knowability, including of itself. I will expand on this below.

Second, outlining one possibility of this extensive theoretical, methodological and empirical applicability of queering, the article puts queer theory in conversation with critical infrastructure studies; to my knowledge, this is the first such attempt. Engaging these bodies of work, I make the case for queering as (un)knowing to analytically approximate the social that is shaped by profoundly intimate power of mega-infrastructures. These projects, I argue, whilst mediating global intensification of capitalism, deeply intersect with social textures and affective layers of subjective life (e.g. Lesutis 2022a, 2022d). As Wilson (2016) notes, ‘for those seeking to understand the intimate operations of power in material, political-economic, and systemic terms, the study of infrastructure offers both an object and a rubric’ (p. 273). In this sense, queer (un)knowing of infrastructure’s lifeworlds highlights how ‘the otherwise unfathomable structural forces of international capitalism’ (Liu 2015, 122) unfold as intimate, individuated experiences that shape and constitute ambiguities of the social.

Queer (un)knowing of infrastructure – for instance, foregrounding its contradictory effects experienced at the level of subjective life – is equally significant for critical infrastructure studies. Concretely, it shows how recent feminist attention to embodied effects of infrastructure (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021) that primarily focuses on women’s corporealities and their intertwinement with infrastructure inevitably ends up reifying a gender binary without critically interrogating its very constitution. This is significant and requires further analytical attention because the study of masculinity and men’s experiences of being gendered has been an important area of inquiry in critical feminist scholarship at large (e.g. Connell 2004; Hearn 2004; Robinson and Hockey 2011). To reflect this, in the article, I analyse men’s infrastructural lives that besides one exception (see Chowdhury 2021) ¹ have been missing in critical infrastructure studies. I show how men’s everyday lives are intertwined with, and are made precarious by, mega-infrastructures. Highlighting how the subjective is also infrastructural, and the infrastructural is subjective, expressed within the non-linearity of social life, in the article, I outline how queering as (un)knowing foregrounds the intimate power of infrastructure, as well as ambiguous, never fully knowable expressions of the social co-constituted by it. I unpack these dynamics through one specific example of a mega-infrastructure project in coastal Kenya.

The infrastructure project in question is the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transportation (LAPSSET) Corridor in Lamu County (Lesutis 2020) whose details I discuss below. Between January 2019 and January 2020, I carried out 10 weeks of research on the sociopolitical effects of the project across Lamu. Focusing on the lives of local fishermen displaced by Lamu Port construction (see Lesutis 2022d), this research included open-ended interviews, informal conversations, and participant observations with the fishermen at times of boat maintenance work, fishing and social gatherings. My queer theory-informed reading of their reflections on the everyday, Lamu Port, and ‘development’, ² in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, highlights the expansive applicability of queer epistemologies that the article proposes.

Overall, by engaging two previously unfamiliar to each other fields of critical inquiry, the article discusses how, besides its usual lines of query about (sexual) normativities, queering might also be analytically productive in theorising contradictory, non-linear and never fully knowable expressions of subjectivity, self and the social that are engendered by the global expansion of capitalism within ecologies of everyday life. I develop this argument in the following way. First, reminding of queer theory’s openness as an always incomplete project, I propose deploying queer theory beyond the matters of (sexual) normativity – namely, approaching queering as (un)knowing. Second, through this queer (un)knowing of infrastructure, I highlight how recent literature on embodied effects of infrastructure reifies a gender binary and thus obscures infrastructure-mediated experiences of the social. Third, I outline how these theoretical and methodological moves count empirically: focusing on fragments of the everyday that are intimately intertwined with the construction of mega-infrastructures in coastal Kenya, I highlight the utility of this queer reading in understanding contradictory, equivocal, non-linear expressions of the social in a specific time and space. I conclude the article by reiterating its main theoretical contributions.

II Queer (un)knowing

Since the early 1990s, queer theory as a body of knowledge that critically interrogates society’s sexual orthodoxies has come to have multiple and often competing meanings. As Sedgwick (1993) noted, queer theory presents an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning’ (p. 8). As a sub-field of critical theory that emerged from gay and lesbian studies and women’s studies, queer theory has been primarily associated with theorising gender and sexual practices that exist outside of, and in a constitutive tension with, normative frameworks of compulsory heterosexuality (Warner 1993). In this way, queering has challenged pervasive, hegemonic forms of hetero-normativity, as well as the heterosexual-homosexual binary, that inscribe heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and homosexuality as ‘its deviant and abhorrent other’ (Browne and Nash 2010, 5). In this sense, explicitly ‘rendering strange’ what is accepted to be ‘normal’, queering highlights that all social orthodoxies are historically contingent and thus deeply political. As Peterson (2017) put it, queering makes explicit ‘how power operates in normative codes and normalising practices that at the same time constitute “deviancy” and “otherings” as sites of social violence’ (p. 114).

Although sexuality and its mercurial modalities of expression have been an enduring occupation of queering, queer theory is not exclusively concerned with the sexual. Therefore, queering is not a synonym for gay and lesbian studies (Giffney 2004), even though in contemporary social theory it has substantially contributed to critical reflections on how power is inscribed and contested through contingencies of gender and sexuality (Smith and Lee 2015: 52). Instead, queer theory is more openly understood as a philosophical commitment to contesting logics of normativity (Rooke 2009). As Puar (2007) explains, ‘there is no exact recipe for a queer endeavour, no a priori system that taxonomizes the linkages, disruptions, and contradictions into a tidy vessel’ (p. xxiii). In this sense, essentialising a queer vantage point, experience or subjectivity would be ‘at odds with commitments to queerness as fluid and manifold’ (Smith 2020: 18; also see Browne and Nash 2010).

This would also result in the imposition of a social and political abstraction of queer. In line with Foucault’s genealogy of a modern subject that disrupts this subject’s illusion of her unity, thereby depriving ‘the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature’ (Sluga 2006: 228), queer does not and cannot represent the truth of subjective life, or a personal, idiosyncratic identification of oneself as a subject. To attempt this, as Floyd (2009) noted, would inevitably risk ‘eliding the ways in which sexuality is constitutively interfered with by other axes of social difference and hierarchy, that is because “queer” is not merely a terminological abstraction; it also refers to a form of social abstraction’ (pp. 14-5). In this sense, queer as a subject is not a radical form of subjectivity that can ultimately surpass social, political and material relationalities that co-constitute social life. Instead, a queer subject is an effect of power and a modality of subjectivation that this power inscribes and reconstitutes itself through. Therefore, just as Lukásc (1991) demonstrated that no subject position under capitalism can guarantee revolutionary consciousness, queerness is no exception either. It is a dialectical situation of oppression and freedom lived concretely in differentiated historical totality (Chitty 2020; Floyd 2009; Liu 2015).

Acknowledging this ambiguity of queerness as a modality and effect of subjectivation, Oswin (2008) argued that queer studies ought to move towards a subjectless critique. In other words, sexuality rather than representing a subject’s truth is a result of power relations beyond questions of a ‘true self’ and ‘inclusion based on identity politics’ that continue to dominate contemporary discourses of sexuality present in liberal activism or non-governmental organisation work. This echoes Edelman’s (2004) work that foregrounded how ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’ (p. 17). In this conjuncture, highlighting the workings of homonormativity – pressures to conform to heterosexist norms sustained by mainstream liberal gay and lesbian identity movements (Duggan 2002) – radical queer theorists approach queer theory as ‘an anti-identity identity politics [which asserts] that identity, as a conceptual category serves as a disciplinary apparatus that pigeonholes the fluidity of the self into a politically docile normativity’ (Lewis 2016: 19). Identity, therefore, might be an important factor in one’s right to self-determination – especially so for historically marginalised groups – but an expression of one’s identity in itself, however non-normative it might appear, is not a means of transformation or revolution.

Grounded within this epistemological context, to queer as a method of knowing the world is to evidence profound tensions – material, social, inter-subjective – that constitute the social and non-linear, radically unknowable and iteratively fleeting forms of subjectivity. Because queerness ‘irreversibly challenges a linear mode of conduction and transmission’ (Puar (2007): xxiii), I propose that a queer way of knowing is that of (un)knowing – knowing but not with absolute certainty. Upon accepting this ontological contingency of the social, queer (un)knowing does not require the sexual, normativity or queerness to become a key point of inquiry. The focus, instead, is the ambiguity of (un)knowing oneself, the other and the world.

However, in spite of queer theory’s openness, a majority of critical, including geographical, scholarship that engages with queer theory continues to be tethered to the question of sexual normativities. For instance, the subjectless critique (e.g. Oswin 2008) still ends up focusing on sexuality and normativity; specifically, ‘a critical approach to the workings of sexual normativities and non-normativities’ (Oswin 2008: 96), or approaching queer politics as experiences of intersectional marginalisation embodied by queered subjects who deviate from hetero-normativity in which ‘the sexual is spatial and the spatial is sexual’ (Oswin 2019: 105). This tendency of approaching queering as a question of the sexual or the deviation from the norm is also reproduced in geographical scholarship on practices of international development where a queer lens has been taken to highlight the (re)inscription of profoundly sexualised modes of power in the historical trajectory of global capital (e.g. Mawsdley 2020). The deployment of queer theory as a question of sexual normativity is also expressed in critical development studies. Kapoor (2015), for instance, approaching ‘queerness-as-structural negativity’, analyses normalising practices of orientalism, homophobia or capitalist hetero-normativity, as well as possibilities of counter-hegemony and alternatives to capitalism within the ‘Third World’ itself. These tendencies are also reproduced in urban political ecology. Gandy (2012), for instance, although presenting the term ‘queer’ as signalling ‘unclassifiable difference or marginality rather than in terms of sexuality itself’ (p. 733), still primarily explores ‘possible lines of intersection between the ecological and sexual significance of marginal urban spaces’ (p. 730) in his conceptual development of queer ecologies. Reiterating this logic, discussing the place of queer in urban political ecology, Heynen (2018) also presents queer scholarship as intertwined with sexual normativities, highlighting queer work to be engaged with ‘hetero-normative development of urban developments’ (p. 446).

In this epistemological context where explicit and sustained efforts to approach queering as not interlinked with (sexual) normativities are rare, I reiterate the openness of queer theory. I want to re-emphasise that to do queer work one does not need to focus on the sexual – that queer is an ‘open mesh of possibilities’ (Sedgwick 1993: 8). Equally, however, I do not aim to deploy queer epistemologies to understand broader social normativities and their violence (e.g. Browne 2006; Gibson-Graham 1999; Oswin 2008; Peterson 2017). Instead, I approach queering as an epistemology that foregrounds (un)knowability – that one can never be fully intelligible to oneself, and by extension to others. This conceptuality expresses itself as a methodological impossibility: what ‘I’ am, when ‘I’ begin, where ‘I’, as a mode of being in the world and of the world, commence and dissolve, are never entirely graspable to a subject. As Liu (2015: 9) argues, ‘queerness indicates a constitutive sociality of the self’. In this sense, one is never a singular being but is always – and undeniably – a plural ontology. Boundaries of one’s embodied life are porous: desire, feelings of love or care, loneliness or despair, are not one’s own but become mediated through others, thus indicating non-singularity of human life (Butler 2004). My argument thus presents an invitation to further reconsider the ambiguity of the social itself and its modalities of inter-subjective, plurally embodied relatedness.

In this sense, queering disrupts and shines light upon – sometimes only fleetingly – non-linear, ambiguous, never-fully-knowable textures of the social, human life and subjectivity. This concerns not only those rendered ‘deviant’ and outside the ‘norm’ but also those subjects who contingently fit dominant frameworks of sociality. As I discuss below, instances of this would include hetero-normative masculinity intertwined with capitalist development or modernity. Here, the sexual forms a part of broader matrixes of power within such frameworks of sociality as, for instance, what constitutes ‘a good, desirable life’, or the notions of ‘order’, ‘progress’ and ‘development’ associated with these normative orderings of the social. However, to do queer work, we do not necessarily need to centre these (sexual) normativities. Instead, to analyse the embodied effects of these normative frames – as well as the non-linearities, ambiguities and contradictions of the social intertwined with them – queering as an epistemology highlights the subject’s life to be radically (un)knowable within the horizon of the social.

This question is also a material one, for social life is not only a discursive effect of sociopolitical power but also unfolds in a material world. This way of doing queer work through attention to materiality is prominent in queer Marxism. It centres how socio-economic conditions created by the development of capitalism profoundly shape possibilities and expressions of oneself, desire, intimacy and one’s connectedness to, and separation from, the world, which are reproduced ‘along unequal axes of power for differently positioned human beings’ (Liu 2015: 31). Here, class is a principal vector of power and struggle. Lewis (2015), for instance, notes that class is primary ‘not in the sense of being more important, but in the sense of being the limit, the foundation, the point where profit is extracted and the point where it can be challenged’ (pp. 274-5). One’s class position, therefore, sets conditions of possibility within which sexuality – just like race, gender, body (dis)ability or nationality – play out as dialectic moments in the differentiated historical totality of capital. Therefore, who and how one is (and can be) is shaped by one’s structural relation to modes of accumulation within the capitalist system of exploitation. Queerness, as mediated by one’s class position, is an expression of this unequal relationship. In this sense, queerness does not substitute homosexuality but ought to be perceived as ‘a material reminder of one’s relation to an unequal structure of power’ (Liu 2015: 40).

Following this, queering as a critical vantage point of power relations highlights how social injustices that stem from exploitation and oppression immanent to capitalism are lived intimately at material conjunctures of the world that make one (un)knowable to oneself. Put differently, I know that what I feel and experience is real, but how I – as a relational, porous self – have come to be, through what spatial (i.e. social and material) relations I contingently emerge and become mediated, are never fully graspable to me through language, senses and thought. Therefore, queerness – as one’s unequal relation to power structures – foregrounds one’s alterity to oneself and to the world of social and material differentiation, which goes beyond identity expressions inseparable from binaries of gender and sexuality. This manner of approaching queerness highlights a multiplicity of ways of relating to oneself, the other and the world.

Read this way, to queer is to look in detail at, and decipher, social, inter-subjective ambiguities and contradictions of oneself that are intimately experienced as manifestations of (un)knowability that unfold at interstices of material and social textures of the world. It is to approximate a subject as fleeting, non-linear and porous – as (un)recognisable to oneself and others. In this sense, queering is a form of radical (un)knowing, wherein to know is to remain humble, accepting the limits of knowledge and experience. It is a commitment to being open to a very real possibility of revision and reconfiguration. This position, however, is not free of tension. After all, what does it mean to know without actually claiming to know the world and oneself in their entirety? Nevertheless, this is precisely the point of queering that lays bare that ‘contradiction, ambivalence and tension reside in all critical enquiries’ (Plummer 2005: 371).

In this sense, as an epistemology of the ambiguity of oneself, and of the world, queer theory is a political project. Abstract universalism of a liberal subject – based on disembodied, white, cis-male forms of rationality and sociality that exist as non-queer or even anti-queer – has been used to make sense of different forms of the social that do not fit within, nor can be comprehended through, these categories of sociality that wrap up white man’s experience ‘as everyone’s truth’ (Heyes 2020: 28). My wager of radical (un)knowability that builds upon and expands queerness as a mode of subjectless critique proposes studying ambiguity within the absence of this universality. Where might a queer endeavour go if we approach queering as (un)knowing? I explore this question in the following section.

III Queer (un)knowing of infrastructure

Queer (un)knowing – as an intellectual and political project that foregrounds the non-linearity of human life within a socially mediated material world – can be productively deployed in understanding the intricacies of social life mediated through global capital. One instance of this expansive queer endeavour could be looking at how far-reaching processes of mega-infrastructure development are experienced by vulnerable groups that come into contact, both violent and mundane, distant and intimate, with such material and ideological expressions of contemporary global capital (Easterling 2014; Lesutis 2021; Schindler and Kanai 2021). After all, queer theory asks what gets constituted as human and how; as well as what does it mean to be human under conditions of inequality that this constitution expresses and mediates? Whilst I conceptualise queering as (un)knowing to foreground the ambiguity of sociality, this is also a question of praxis: to be human is to find one’s way in the world that exists before – or in spite of the fact that – theory and philosophy attempt to deconstruct it.

This is a question of methodology. In empirically grounded research, whether ethnographically thin or thick, the question that bears asking is the following: how do we know what it means to be human – as an effect, mediation and limit of power – in the context of one’s research (as in the world at large)? Undeniably, research is not a vacuum of reality devoid of power relations. Instead, it unfolds as a socially mediated intersection of time, temporality, and space wherein social and material entanglements of life are scrutinised as one chooses to study them (e.g. Lesutis 2018). Even if many of these relationalities (for instance, everyday struggles to cope with dispossession, state violence or infrastructure development) at the first sight might appear to be unrelated to intimately lived registers of sociopolitical power through which hegemonic biopolitical orders of capital are reproduced, queer ways of (un)knowing do not accept them as such. To lead queer life is to experience one’s body as not one’s own but as always given over to the world of not one’s own making, unavoidably in a (conflictual) relation to what is deemed right, appropriate or acceptable by others (Butler 2004). Therefore, to be (interpellated as) queer is to vividly experience one’s existence as intertwined with love and care, violence and neglect, from the other: those in tangible proximity whom one might recognise, as well as impersonal, faceless systems that, without a touch, determine who, in what ways, and under what temporal and spatial circumstances, can meaningfully count as human.

Following this, if infrastructures are indeed ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’, with their ‘peculiar ontology’ pertaining to the fact that ‘they are things and also the relation between things’ (Larkin 2013: 329), how do then infrastructures – besides more commonly analysed economic, social and political relations (e.g. Graham and Marvin 2001; Graham and McFarlane 2015) – also intersect with possibilities of counting as human, as well as with relations of self? In what ways are they intertwined with intimacy that, as Puar (2017) puts it, is constituted ‘as an elaboration of the interior self’ that registers ‘affective tendencies – intensity, turbulence, chemistry, attraction, repulsion, sonic waves – betwixt and between human bodies, thus ordering and fixing these bodies along the genealogical grid’ (p. 163)?

Key to these modalities of order-making and affective tendencies of relatedness to, or separation from, the world (as, for instance, expressed in collectively shared visions of a ‘better life’, ‘progress’ or ‘development’), are infrastructure-mediated forms of politics. These are advanced by a modern state through infrastructure development (Barry 2001; Lesutis 2021; Von Schnitzler 2016). This techno-politics as a mode of governance is profoundly biopolitical; as I demonstrate in detail elsewhere (see Lesutis 2022d), mega-infrastructures make and unmake lifeworlds, in this way inscribing specific subjective dispositions within state’s biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. In other words, infrastructures enable some subject groups, particularly those privileged in social hierarchies of the national body politic, to advance their lives, whilst simultaneously disavowing the lives of those already marginalised. Infrastructures, therefore, order how (im)possibilities of a liveable life unfold across space – specifically how they are attached to, or disentangled from, infrastructure systems that state or private actors build in their capital accumulation strategies.

How are human lives and intricacies of the social then mediated by techno-politics of infrastructure? How can infrastructure – as ‘both an object and rubric’ (Wilson 2016) – help us ‘understand the intimate operations of power in material, political-economic, and systemic terms’ (p. 273)? In what ways are affective tendencies of embodied connections to the world mediated through infrastructure? How does this mediation fix bodies into spatial grids of power, thus ordering possibilities of liveability? In the growing literature on embodied effects of infrastructure, the experiences of women ³ generally represent corporeal entanglements of infrastructure (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021). Whilst these analyses register harmful intimacies of infrastructure, or the lack thereof, they, however, ought to be extended beyond the focus on women’s lives, especially if we aim to provide a fuller understanding of how infrastructure intersects with the social. This, for instance, concerns masculine experiences and expressions of gender as embodied, everyday effects of infrastructure that, besides a few exceptions (e.g. Chowdhury 2021), have been overlooked in critical infrastructure studies.

For instance, in Anand’s (2017) account of hydraulic citizenship in Mumbai constituted through infrastructure-mediated relations between urban residents and different authorities (including plumbers, politicians and engineers), masculine normativities of these groups are not examined. Similarly, the gendered nature of technical engineering works, bureaucracy or science and social frameworks of masculinity that they transmit–in spaces of infrastructure development is also a missed opportunity for critical reflection to further interrogate intimate, embodied social worlds of infrastructure in the seminal work by Harvey and Knox (2015) on roads and highway construction in South America that explores how public infrastructure projects shape social relations, alongside state formations and emerging political economies. On the other hand, in the texts that do explicitly analyse gendered dynamics of infrastructure (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021), masculine forms of being gendered and how they intersect with infrastructure systems are not only bracketed but are also meshed with the violence of infrastructure. These texts show that, owing to the absence of infrastructures, or their malfunction, women become victims of explicitly gendered direct forms of violence perpetrated by patriarchy.

Whilst these recent feminist analyses of infrastructure broaden the field of critical infrastructure studies – namely, by including questions of infrastructure-mediated experiences of embodiment and gender – it remains important to highlight how infrastructure is gendered in ways that exceed these feminist approaches that reify a gender binary without interrogating it. After all, queer theory shows the male-female binary to be socially and politically constructed, ⁴ thus asking to further dissect intersecting material and affective textures of the social. As Wilson (2016) argues, infrastructure intermeshes with multifarious, often unnoticeable expressions of intimacy. These go beyond the dominant gendered understandings of infrastructure in the recent literature (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021). As we are aware from the epicentre of European critical theory, infrastructures played a key role in the biopolitics of life. This was foregrounded in Foucault’s (1975) analysis of Panopticon-like infrastructures such as hospitals and prisons as the most paradigmatic infrastructures of biopower. Although less acknowledged, this is also visible in intimate infrastructures, such as public toilets, for instance, where dominant values of bourgeoise morality and ‘appropriate’ behaviour in private and public spaces were inscribed in the wake of modernity in a European metropolis (Edelman 1996: 152; Gershenson and Penner 2009). These infrastructures, despite being key instruments of biopolitical power and control, simultaneously provided a material means for same-sex desires, particularly for male-to-male sexual contact, to be explored in spaces sheltered from the public eye (Andersson and Campkin 2009: 208).

Therefore, infrastructure – as techno-politics that exposes different subjects to multi-faceted forms of symbolic and material subjugation, as well as to state and capital power (Lesutis 2022b, 2022c, 2022d) – also intersects with social, intimate, embodied textures of masculinity. As I argue below, infrastructure spaces (Easterling 2014), wherein different scales of connectedness – of global capital, nation-state, regional or urban development – come together as modes of ‘development’ (Schindler and Kanai 2021), are also intimate spaces of desire, anxiety or despair. These modalities of relatedness, however, appear invisible from an abstract view of state power or infrastructure. In geographical scholarship, these dynamics have been addressed by foregrounding the relationship between the state, citizenship and infrastructure. Fredericks (2018), for instance, analyses how sociopolitical belonging is constituted through one’s quotidian and political engagement with urban infrastructures. Echoing this, the volume on ‘infrastructural citizenship’ edited by Lemanski (2019) examines the material and civil nature of urban life for both the state and its citizens. Here, citizenship functions as a primary vector of belonging, either provided by the state or social demands for inclusion into the national body politic (also see Anand 2017; Harvey and Know 2015).

Nevertheless, building on this, Lesutis (2022b) demonstrates how infrastructure constitutes subject positions that, including affective states of hope, anticipation, anxiety and despair, cannot be explained through the abstract and inherently liberal discourse of ‘citizenship’. In this sense, as a techno-political modality of governance that advances specific visions of the state (e.g. Barry 2001; Hecht 2011; Von Schnitzler 2016), infrastructure functions at both techno-political and emotive levels – it shapes the subject’s life at a material level, as well as provides a semiotic framework for the subject to make sense of her personal experience and social position (Lesutis 2022b). The abstract discourse of rights to citizenship, devoid of these relations, therefore, might create epistemological obscurity, particularly in the postcolony whose histories cannot be comprehended through liberal conceptualisations of state-society relations (Zeiderman 2016).

However, this tension between abstract systems of subjectivation and social modalities of life is not specific to infrastructure development or the Global South. Historically, a discourse of modernity has attributed a transcendental human subject – impersonal, non-atomistic, rational – with the autonomous agency to act upon the world. Foucault (1976), though, deconstructed this dynamic through a genealogical approach to power and subjectivity, in this way showing an illusion of the subject’s unity. Building on queer (un)knowability, queering infrastructure as a mode of relationality underlines this non-linear, radically (un)knowable life of the subject – as well as (un)knowability of self – in material and social textures of the everyday in infrastructure spaces or their shadows. Several fragments of my research on LAPSSET in coastal Kenya illustrate these dynamics as I discuss in the following section.

IV Infrastructure and precarious masculinities

The Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor was officially initiated in 2013. Central to Kenya’s national development programme ‘Vision 2030’, it is supposed to bring national ‘development’ by opening a second national transport corridor. This corridor encompasses different layers of transport infrastructures, including networks of highways, a standard gauge railway, an oil pipeline and an airport (Lesutis 2020). Lamu Port is a focal point of LAPSSET. Other plans in the region include developing a Special Economic Zone, an oil refinery and a new state-of-the-art city, conceptualised with explicit references to global symbols of contemporary capitalism, such as Silicon Valley or Dubai, which projects ‘high-modernism’ (Scott 1998) that is to come to the region (Mosley and Watson 2016: 456-7). With this ‘modern’ aesthetic, LAPSSET constitutes compelling imaginaries of ‘prosperity’. In this way, for the Kenyan state authorities like the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority (LCDA), mega-infrastructures function as biopolitics (see Lesutis 2022d) – ‘the driver to socio-economic growth and development that defines the path to transformation and evolution of human society’ (LCDA 2016: 28).

As I discuss in detail elsewhere (Lesutis 2020), LAPSSET plays a structural function in regional and global regimes of extractive capitalism, which advances the class position of Kenya’s elites by increasing their socio-economic privileges and control of resources. Supposed to instigate ‘development’, LAPSSet also symbolically articulates an ideal subject of the future Kenya: a mobile and entrepreneurial citizen that will directly benefit from infrastructure development and transforming socio-economic landscapes. For instance, in an official presentation on the expected outcomes of the project prepared by the LCDA, President Uhuru Kenyatta is quoted as saying that LAPSSET, as part of Kenya’s ‘Vision 2030’, ‘will create jobs which will enable our people to meet their basic needs. Jobs will transform the lives of our people from that of hardship and want, to new lives of greater comfort and well-being. And that is the future I have seen’ (LCDA 2019: 7). Gesturing at these temporalities of the prosperous future, one civil servant also observed that ‘the master plan [of the Special Economic Zone in Lamu] is full of spectacular investments that the Kenyan Government wants to bring – casinos, hotels, laboratories, even an opera house; it is going to be like the Middle East. This will change people there too, they will start new businesses, they will make the most of these opportunities – they will be modern Kenyans’ (Nairobi, November 2019).

This ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ – a widely accepted goal to provide the universal, uniform infrastructure that continues to influence development policies across the Global South (Graham and Marvin 2001) – shapes social life in much more precarious and highly unequal ways than officially acknowledged. Like other national mega-infrastructure projects (Lesutis 2022b), LAPSSET is advancing techno-politics of the state that result in class-based socio-economic differentiation across Kenya (Lesutis 2021) – it subjects the poor to both everyday hardships and emerging desires for a transformative change. This, for instance, co-constitutes precarious masculinities that flee classifications of either struggle or hope that intersect with, and at times undo, one another. Several fragments of my research in Lamu highlight this tension – as well as the impossibility of fully knowing the subject – in the shadows of mega-infrastructure spaces.

1 Fragment 1: Infrastructure development as dispossession

The new port is located in Manda Bay at the southern edge of the Lamu Archipelago. The construction commenced in 2012. At the time of research (November 2019–January 2020), out of the planned 32 berths, 3 berths that had claimed a total of 5 square kilometres of the bay were nearing completion. The first birth started operating on 20 May 2021. The port construction, including land reclaiming from the sea, digging and dredging works, destroyed coral reefs and mangroves that are the main fish breeding grounds, which made the area unsuitable for fishing. In the remaining area of the bay, since the initiation of the port construction, fish catch has decreased significantly due to the ongoing dredging works that, bringing up dirt and sand, pollute fish breeding grounds. Consequently, artisanal fishing has become especially challenging during the rainy season between April and July, for Manda Channel, sheltered from strong winds and waves of the Indian Ocean, used to be the main fishing area during this season. Due to the extremely limited local capacity to purchase advanced equipment for deep-sea fishing in the highly precarious context of Lamu’s fishing industry (see Lesutis 2022d), poor fishermen have fewer opportunities to practice their livelihoods. Relatedly, the existing local transport corridor between the islands within the Lamu Archipelago is expected to be increasingly more limited by marine traffic once Lamu Port starts fully operating. Even the fishermen who previously did not work in Manda Bay are concerned about the port construction. In the future, they anticipate a complete displacement of fisherfolk from the bay, and that this will inevitably lead to increased competition in the remaining, already severely overexploited in-shore fishing grounds.

Therefore, even at the initial stages of development, Lamu Port is significantly re-arranging material conditions of social life in the area. Rather than transforming artisanal fishers into ‘modern’ subjects (whether they like it or not) as promised by the Kenyan Government through the development of LAPSSET, the existing livelihoods of the poor fishermen are marginalised by Lamu Port. The decreasing access to fishing areas results in anxiety about fishermen’s lives, futures and their changing position in Lamu’s social landscapes. Certainly, expressions and forms of masculinity are not stable but are always contestable as they are shaped within specific clusters of social relations (e.g. Connell 2004; Hearn 2004; Robinson and Hockey 2011). In a postcolony like Kenya, men’s access to resources and wealth – mediated through class position and property ownership – is central to normativities of masculinity and respectability in one’s community (Meiu 2015). In these contexts, for instance, benefiting from access to resources of the state, politicians-cum-businessmen depict themselves as ‘big-men’, thus inscribing their masculinity and social worth (Berman 1998: 330; Bayart 1993).

In Lamu, I witnessed a reverse dynamic. Struggling to make ends meet, poor fishermen fear being equalled with boys, thus being denied a right of social passage and respectability, with their status denigrated if they are unable to provide for their families. Young fishermen, for instance, described their fears of ‘having to walk around town like beach boys trying to fool tourists’ (Lamu, January 2020). To these men, such actions would undermine their place in the community. As one of them noted, ‘this is not what a real man does. A real man knows how to take care of himself and his family without having to beg’ (Lamu, December 2019). Highlighting this tension, these men shared stories about several local wives who had left their husbands for construction workers and engineers who, employed in the port, can give them ‘a better life’. According to these accounts, the men left behind became depressed and started drinking. Whilst I do not intend to prove or dispute the ethnographic validity of such accounts, these narrated fragments of everyday life, either way, indicate how spaces of mega-infrastructure development intersect with the social – specifically, class and gender – resulting in precarisation not only at a material level (Lesutis 2022a) but also within a deep, intimate sense of oneself as a gendered subject. As Chowdhury (2021) similarly observes, facing urban developments that do not include them, poor men feel like ‘an anomaly’ in these infrastructure spaces. Here, a class position sets conditions of possibility within which one’s gender plays out as a dialectical moment in the world of not one’s own making.

2 Fragment 2: Infrastructure development as desire

In spite of the challenges brought by LAPSSET (also see Lesutis 2022d), the construction of Lamu Port also induces aspirations for a positive change, as well as constituting desires for a different future, however implausible their realisation might be. As Heyes (2020: 22) notes, ‘as embodied subjects we always exist spatially and temporally, with an interesting bent toward the future’. Whilst the topographies of life in Lamu are shaped by one’s unprivileged class position and thus are disempowering, this ‘bent toward the future’, as a social ontology of being, flees the precarity of one’s life, iterating dreams about what one’s life could be like. These aspirations of an otherwise were noticeable, although only through fragments, in the everyday of the displaced fishermen. As I spent time with several of these young men – conversing with them as they prepared fishing nets, sitting at a beach and chewing khat at night, or going for night-sailing into the bay where, sheltered by the fall of night, these men (many of them Muslim) could relax on a drifting boat and drink home-made beer – we formed fleeting bonds of friendship. In these hours spent together, I started to notice that, regardless of everyday hardships that the new port had brought, it also engenders affective modalities of desire, particularly for a positive, transformative change in these men’s lives. As Hillewaert (2020) examines in ethnographic detail, in Lamu, younger generations, facing regional economic and political marginalisation (Chome 2020), deeply long for ‘development and westernisation’ that, as symbols of ‘modernity’, acquire ideological force.

Reflecting these affective tendencies through which infrastructure is lived as a promise of development in spite of its materialities of ruination (Lesutis 2022c), Lamu’s fishermen also spoke about the port as an inevitable change that might make Lamu County ‘more modern’, but only if ‘investments were done right’. As one man noted, ‘I don’t think I will see these changes yet, but my daughters might – maybe 1 day they will take a ferry to Mombasa to do business there, [once] the space will open for more travel’ (Lamu, January 2020). Besides dreams about advancing one’s class position, these desires for a prosperous future also cut into intimate layers of self. One man in his early 30s, for instance, shared his visions of how Lamu could become ‘a cosmopolitan place, with people coming from everywhere’. This, he imagined, would positively transform the conditions of his life; as he emphasised, ‘[the] port could really change this place, it could bring opportunities for us, it could bring different people [to Lamu]. I could even meet different women from other places – like you, you can travel anywhere, you can see the world. If you want, you can have a girlfriend in each place you visit’ (Lamu, December 2019).

In these narrative instances, the port rather than being a source of anxiety becomes entangled within one’s disadvantaged class position, gender and resultant desires for, and imagination of, different futures. In this sense, large-scale infrastructure developments – regardless of their violence (Lesutis 2022c; Rodgers and O'Neill 2012) – also constitute affective economies of anticipation, for people expect, as well as mobilise to ensure, positive changes in their lives. Anticipating future mega-developments, they try to secure access to land and other natural resources (Elliot 2016), attempt to practice new livelihoods (Lesutis 2021) or make political claims about governance and autochthonous belonging (Enns 2019; Lesutis 2023). The fleeting fragments of the everyday in Lamu, such as the one above, indicate that these economies of anticipation also intermesh with deeper intimate layers of self. Therefore, binaries between the world and subjective life do not exist as clearly defined but collide with the geopolitical – like techno-politics of mega-infrastructures – that, as Pain and Staeheli (2014) observe, functions as ‘also and already intimate’ (p. 345).

3 (Un)knowability

Considering these fragments of the everyday in Lamu, what is the use of noticing the partial, the fleetingand the sometimes located in the margins of the social that appear only in passing, and thus in the best-case scenario are only mentioned in footnotes, or are often bracketed altogether? Foregrounding these fragments, what kinds of claims can we make about life in the shadows of mega-infrastructures? On the one hand, taken together, these narrative fragments demonstrate how structural inequalities of global capitalism further entrenched by mega-infrastructure developments are also lived within intimate parameters of the social, cutting deeply into layers of subjectivity. As queer theorists highlight, these social wounds are slit open through gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality or body (dis)ability (e.g. Oswin 2008; Puar 2017; Smith 2018). Regarding Kenya’s mega-infrastructures, amongst other power vectors such as race (Kimari and Ernstson 2020) or class and ethnicity (Lesutis 2022b, 2023) that deepen socio-economic differentiation, these dynamics also intersect with the experiences of gender that are lived as precarious expressions of hegemonic masculinity. In this sense, mega-infrastructures and challenges brought by them bolster orthodoxies of masculinity. Intersecting with class, they disadvantage poor men who struggle to meet normative objectives of their gender as I outline above. In this context, queer (un)knowing of infrastructure highlights quotidian struggles and desires of a different future articulated by poor men – a form of infrastructural gendering overlooked in recent feminist analyses of urban and infrastructure development (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022).

Queer (un)knowing of infrastructure also shows that the subject co-shaped by mega-infrastructures is not fully knowable. It both struggles and dreams. There is no conclusive way to lay bare its truth, for different affective layers of this subject’s life intermesh into (un)knowability. As the stories of the fishermen in Lamu highlight, this subject, although dispossessed by the new port, is also simultaneously hoping for a number of positive transformations to be brought by such developments. Neither of these accounts is more telling or true than the other – both indicate how this subject is located across time and in space, in the world that cannot be contained within, nor explained through, one narrative. This contradiction within different layers of self indicates that no form of social violence – of infrastructure development, capital accumulation or biopolitical power – is ever final (Lesutis 2022a). Instead, possibilities of an otherwise are always present. However, that is an ontological ambiguity of the social that cannot be predicted, nor guaranteed, but is lived contingently in mediated historical totality.

V Concluding Thoughts

In the article, I presented the case for deploying queer theory in theoretically, methodologically and empirically expansive ways. The primary aim of this project is to analyse the social more broadly, as well as the dynamics of subjectivation more specifically, beyond intimate spheres of (sexual) normativities traditionally associated with queering. I argued that this has not been sufficiently explored in queer theorising. Although highlighting the openness of queer epistemologies, for the most part, queering has remained tethered to (sexual) normativities and their social violence (e.g. Gibson-Graham 1999; Oswin 2008, 2019; Peterson 2017). Taking queer theory’s openness to the very core of this article’s intellectual endeavour, I precisely focused on this expansive reading of queering as one possibility of the queer future. Whilst the sexual and the normative are part of the social (and I do not intend to deny their importance), in the article, I argued that we can do queer work without having to centre them. The ways in which subjective, embodied life is entangled with materialities of the world, how it is sustained or comes undone, and the manner that it moves across social topographies of (im)possibility, intersecting with lives of close and distant others, are queer questions, for queer epistemologies foreground the indelible (un)knowability about what it means to be human.

Attesting ontological interdependability of social life, Butler (2004) conceptualised this (un)knowability as porosity – social and material dependence of one’s life on close and distant others that cannot be disavowed, wherein (sexual) normativity is one determinant, amongst others, of human life and its ontological plurality. In the article, I argued that, focusing on this porosity that queering foregrounds, we can more broadly understand subjectivity and the social as modalities and expressions of radical (un)knowability. Attempting to think about how queering is for ‘everyone’, Lewis (2015), for instance, noted that ‘people are neither self-made individuals nor reflections of a cultural collective spirit, nor reducible to permanent “things”, but conscious points moving and changing with a system’ (p. 50). Queering as (un)knowing foregrounds this relation – it articulates one possibility of acknowledging, and working with, the ambiguity of self as a mode of intervention into socially mediated material world and sociopolitical power (of capital) that grips it.

There is no doubt, of course, that queer theory is immensely useful in explicitly understanding (sexual) normativities of social, political and economic relations (e.g. Smith 2020). Some of these dynamics are, therefore, unavoidably occluded by expanding queering as (un)knowing to engage with questions of subjectivity, self and the social more broadly. However, this expansion of queering is also a necessary intellectual and political project. Alongside feminist or decolonial epistemologies, central to queer modes of critique are gestures of revealing a false universalism of a liberal subject that is often invoked to make sense of multiple socialities that cannot readily fit within these abstract categories of the social. In this spirit of critique, the article proposed one way to think about queering as (un)knowing to theoretically approach the ambiguity of social life, not through questions of normativity but through a praxis of (un)knowability.

Articulated in this way, queer (un)knowing of mega-infrastructures highlights how unfathomable global structures of capital cut into social textures and intimate layers of subjective life. In coastal Kenya, unfolding as entangled with other currents of the social – the everyday given over to dispossession, livelihood disruption and struggle that are brought by mega-infrastructure development (e.g. Chome 2020; Lesutis 2022d) – these experiences highlight the intimate power of infrastructure to shape multiple layers of self. This, however, not only concerns the lives of women analysed in the recent literature on embodied effects of infrastructure (e.g. Datta and Ahmed 2020; Truelove and O’Reilly 2021; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022) but is also directly intertwined with affective currents of masculinity. In the article, I outlined how, in Lamu, poor men experience infrastructure-mediated anxieties about their place in the world of not their own making. They are subjected to heightened precarity that results from infrastructure development that connects the global with the local, and mega-infrastructures with vulnerable lives. However, as much as this subjectivation unfolds through precarity and struggle, new grandiose infrastructures, in spite of their violence, are also objects of desire for more prosperous futures that are articulated by the very subjects these infrastructures dispossess. Precarity as a mode and effect of capital’s violence, therefore, is never final (Lesutis 2022a). Queer theorising is particularly insightful in highlighting this indelible tension within affective textures of the social. It shows that ambiguities of social life cannot be disavowed.

Queer theory, therefore, besides its traditional focus areas on queer lives (e.g. Weber 2016), the sexual (e.g. Smith 2020) or normativity (e.g. Gibson-Graham 1999), can also be deployed to analyse the social, subjectivity and human life more broadly. What the article calls queering as (un)knowing concerns how the intimate – embodied, affectively lived substance of dreaming, desire and struggle that unfold within, and in spite of, debilitating grips of precarity – is intertwined with manifold typographies of the world in ambiguous, non-linear, never fully knowable ways. Resolution for this tension does not exist. Sharp edges of living conjoin and move apart. However, this does not mean that conditions of possibility are limitless, or that queering is ‘merely cultural’ (Butler 1997). As Browne and Nash (2010) note, queer epistemologies demonstrate how ‘the ability to experience the variability of a self is embedded in power relations that limit and/or open up certain possibilities and not others’ (p. 6). It is these non-linear mercurialities of subjective life, sociality and spaces of relentless intensification of capitalism that require queering to (un)know them, approximating at least some form of understanding.