The Price of Inclusion: Sexual Subjectivity, Violence and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

This dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire to explore how the subjectivities of les branchés - a local term encompassing several categories of same-sex desire and practice including travestis, woubis, yossis, and increasingly, "MSM" - are mediated through violence and the nonprofit industry. In the fight against HIV/AIDS, some sexual minorities have become "exceptional" subjects and the targets of increased global health and human rights interventions. Local activists in Abidjan engaged with a complex web of governments, donor institutions, and global Northern NGOs to create local nonprofits in which branchés embodied their social positions and conducted, named, understood, and represented themselves and others. But in the wake of Côte d'Ivoire's 2010-2011 political crisis, state violence also shaped the ways in which branchés identified themselves and one another and came to embody these positions. My research participants positioned themselves and others as certain kinds of branchés but also as certain kinds of Ivoirians. HIV peer educators and activists marginalized travestis and branchés of certain ethnic, classed and religious backgrounds in the very spaces created to offer new inclusion on the basis of sexual orientation and regularly asserted that northern Ivoirians and Muslims were more homophobic and less modern than their southern Christian neighbors. These identifications reflect ultranationalist discourses of modernity and belonging that link ethnic, cultural and religious affiliation to citizenship. Thus, I contribute to anthropological work on sexual minority men's lives, the complexity of sexual citizenship and NGO practice, and the logics of homophobia and violence in post-conflict zones.