Co‐Creating Sensuous Knowledge Through Food Practices With Women and LGBTQI+ Migrants in South Africa

Abstract

African feminisms have always been informed by activism, but the development of Western‐style separation between thought and action influenced by colonial and apartheid legacies has compromised the scholarly connection between intellectual work and political action. African feminists have thus developed contextualized and critical approaches to mending the relationship between knowledge and power‐in‐action, necessitating meaningful and reciprocal collaboration with communities that experience marginalisation and oppression. African migrants in South Africa represent one of these communities, as they face xenophobic, racist, homo‐ and transphobic discourses and practices in their daily lives, pushing them to the margins of society. At the intersection of African feminisms and the socio‐economic and political discrimination of migrants, we open a dialogue between two PhD projects, both working with women and LGBTQI+ migrants in South Africa. We discuss how our different feminist research approaches (re)centre the lived experiences of women and LGBTQI+ migrants of different national backgrounds, focusing on their bodily and psychological capacities for sensing and sharing pleasure through food practices. We show that the co‐creation of "sensuous knowledge" with migrant research participants enables us to unsettle the oppressive forces that marginalise such communities. Paying close attention to where power is contested, we analyse not only the complexity of how African feminisms translate into liberatory participatory research practices, but also how migrants - through their (re)creation of pleasure and joy through food - challenge and expand how feminisms can be applied across the African continent.