Filming the invisible: Rubrics of ordinary life in Stories of Our Lives (2014)

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I offer a reading of Stories of Our Lives (2014), a documentary about the experiences of queer people who live in the city of Nairobi. I am interested in how through the use of the documentary film, the director of the film and the queer people whose lives are represented, articulate new forms of inhabiting and being in the city. This is despite the legal and political hurdles that govern queer liveability in Kenya. I argue that when queer individuals inhabit, move through, move in, occupy or transit through city spaces in their daily habits, practices, rituals and performances, a rubric is generated. As a form, this rubric of ordinary also works both in, and outside of the convention of the documentary film. This rubric not only destabilizes the circulating discourses about queer sexuality, it also crafts a unique queer subjectivity that transcends the physical limitations of the city that enliven forms of queer world making