‘Queering’ and querying academic identities in postgraduate education

In the social imaginary of higher education, there are many mutually constitutive forces shaping academic identities, such as academics’ habitus, dispositions, race, gender and student expectations. Our queer academic identities are furthermore robustly intertwined with, and emerging within, cultural, political and economic histories and realities. In post-apartheid South Africa, our academic identities are constituted in the nexus of historical white privilege on the one hand, and on the other hand, the prevailing heteronormative and homophobic public sentiment on the African continent. In the intersection of race and gender as technologies of power, we perform our identities as academics as processamidst often incommensurable and multiple claims and counterclaims. In the context of being and becoming academics, our identities as nomadsprovide a particular coherence, continuity and stability, albeit a continually ‘changing core but the sense of a core nonetheless – that at any given moment is enunciated as the “I”’ (Brah, A. 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 123–124). In this collaborative autoethnographic narrative, we explore becoming and being nomad as one particular lens among many others to describe our personal journeys and map a selection of issues of (dis)location and transitions that constitute our subjective and material experiences and our own trajectories of becoming. Three analytics constructs are explored: namely spaces of becoming, cycles of becoming and negotiating and performing becoming.