ABSTRACT
Due to increasing fears regarding terrorism, in 2015, the Kenyan state re-issued a strict directive requiring all refugees in Kenya to move back to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)-run refugee camps – making it illegal for refugees to live outside of designated camp areas. Although Kenya continues to criminalise homosexuality, the presence of the UNHCR in-country coupled with the passage of Uganda’s now-infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) meant that a number of those interned were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) refugees. At the time of entering the camp, LGBTI refugees and allies created a series of online fundraising campaigns via the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. It is these campaigns in their global circulation via the Internet and what they tell us about the spatial and temporal experience of resettlement as a ‘waiting event’ that this chapter explores. I suggest that LGBTI refugees’ prolific self-publication and use of GoFundMe specifically resist the spatial and temporal logics of the camp, a space designated for their waiting, by crafting a temporality that refuses the experience of waiting as suspension within the camp. This access to the virtual means that they are not solely confined to the physical space of the refugee camp but are, simultaneously, projecting themselves both into their future goal of resettlement and thereby transforming the experience of waiting in their present.
