Lensu Suvi

PhD Candidate in Anthropology and African studies,
University of Edinburgh (UK)

The post-genocide Rwanda has seen a great effort in reuniting its people over the old ethnic lines of Hutus, Tutsis. Alongside civic rituals and duties that have been (re)introduced to construct a sense of national identity and a single ethnicity (Banyarwanda), the state-coordinated harmony is demonstrated in the country’s aesthetic order and bio-politics. Whereas the racist policy, established by colonial rule (Germany and Belgium) was mastered through aesthetic identification of Hutus and Tutsis apart, the present-day Rwanda aims to revolt the old discriminatory characterisation by creating nearly homogenous meanings over aesthetic identities. Often lauded as ‘Africa’s cleanest country”, the neat and organised display of public spaces extends to performances and aesthetics of idealised citizens. (Mullikin et al. 2019) Rwanda’s fascination for uniforms, an absence of public misbehaviour and national “Sport Sundays” are examples of what imagined (and to some extend realised) harmonious and healthy citizens look like. In 2019 Rwandan government banned importing of European and American donated second-hand clothing as well as selling of skin-bleaching products. Although Rwanda is evidently supporting its national textile industry and regulating dangerous cosmetic usage the government is nevertheless producing body-politics that has class- rather than ethnicity related consequences. Aesthetic citizenship (Liebelt 2019) provides a useful framing to explore post-war Rwanda’s (anti-colonial) governance over beauty, health, fashion and bodies.
Based on a year-long fieldwork in Rwanda, where I followed female and transgender cross-border sex workers, I study how my interlocutors navigate the different meanings of aesthetic citizenship. Drawing from my ethnographic observations I look at queer and trans people’s negotiations at borders crossings. Bureaucratic features like photos, names and sex in travel documents were reminders of categories and ‘official citizenship’ where the queer and trans sex workers did not belong to. Instead, they were constantly performing an accepted (aesthetic) identity and adapting strategies to easily navigate through the physical biometrical state surveillance at Rwandan borders. For my interlocutors who had already left sex work, remnants and in their bodies such as tattoos were aesthetic marks of a different lifestyle and social class. How my interlocutors used now banned second-hand fashion as well as skin bleaching products became part of the everyday tactics they employed to belong to their lifeworlds at home and away. To analyse what aesthetic citizenship may look like for the Rwandan cross-border sex workers, I utilise different framings such as aesthetic labour, aesthetic morality and cosmopolitan practises. I conclude my paper by arguing that although aiming at building a united identity, the post-genocide governance and bio-politics in Rwanda have paradoxically re-established aesthetic citizenship as a big part of it. How marginalised, gendered and sexed bodies such as my interlocutors navigate in above described social fabrication requires – I argue – aesthetic appropriation. Instead of trying to ‘fit in’ with the national rhetoric, nor mimicking western or colonial ideas of bodies, beauty and fashion (by consuming European second-hand clothing and bleaching products) my interlocutors were appropriating looks that were malleable, urban and translocal. By doing so, they were quietly resisting state-coordinated aesthetics and recreating what could be interpreted as a subaltern aesthetic citizenship.