Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse received her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She is currently completing her first monograph, Gays and Girls Make Worlds, which shows how gender and sexually diverse communities of colour living under apartheid in South Africa undertook the politically and culturally significant work of creating more just and expansive realities, with a particular focus on the GALA Queer Archive’s Kewpie Photographic Collection and associated depictions of Cape Town’s lost District Six. Building on this research, Ruth’s next major project will offer the first critical genealogy of the Southern African word moffie: customarily a pejorative descriptor for individuals read as effeminate men that has been recently reclaimed as a defiant term of self-identification in a manner comparable to queer in the global North. Prior to joining the Bonham Centre as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruth has been a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, a Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, and Merton College’s inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Scholar. She remains an Associate of the Stuart Hall Foundation and is an organizing member of the queer South African collective Salon Kewpie. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography and has been awarded a prize by the Queer African Studies Association.