Objects, intimacy, citizenship: A response

Social differences premised on class and the rural–urban distinction are also central to the making of the homosexual as a target of repudiation. Mwenda Ntarangwi asks that I reflect on “how the subject of homosexuality [is] further framed against this juxtaposition of urban and rural images of livelihood and identity” and on how class tensions play out through intimacy. Rather than approach class or rural–urban boundaries as stable markers of difference, I interrogate them (as Ntarangwi does) as processes of reification in context. What I find most interesting in this sense is how anxieties that emerge over the slipperiness—indeed fuzziness—of these claims to difference also inform efforts to sexualize and stabilize boundaries between the classes or along rural–urban divides. Town dwellers often have family and kin in the village, foster their rural kin’s children, or invest in land, agriculture, or rituals in the countryside. So, too, rural seasonal migrants are a common presence in all cities. Hence, social realities render the very separation between the rural and the urban ambiguous. Similarly, the fetishization (and glorification) of the middle class in Kenyan national discourse occludes a context in which “middle-class” households depend on rural or working-class labor, whether as maids, babysitters, gardeners, watchmen, or on the support of poorer relatives or rural kin and acquaintances.