President's Showcase
Miguel Gonzalez He/Him/His
Supervising Professor: Dr. Joseph Hellweg
Miguel Gonzalez was born in Miami, of a Colombian mother and a Cuban refugee father. He grew up spending time in all three countries and attended Westland Hialeah Senior High School, where he was president of the Queer Student Union and competed on the swimming and water polo teams. He is a senior at FSU, pursuing a BA in international affairs, concentrating in modern languages. He serves as the French Club’s vice president and tutors students in elementary French. Miguel has volunteered to help students learn English as a second language at the “American Space,” of the US Embassy, at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Côte d’Ivoire, and at FSU’s Center for intensive English Studies. He is fluent in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is currently an undergraduate honors-in-the-major thesis candidate working with Dr. Joseph Hellweg, a cultural anthropologist, West Africanist, and Associate Professor of Religion. Following graduation, he will seek a master's degree in international affairs to become a diplomat.
Abstract
To gather data for my thesis, I spent eight weeks among Queer communities in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, a city of over four million people in West Africa. I completed my research under the additional guidance of Dr. Jacques N’goran Kouakou, a sociolinguist at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University and with the approval of Dr. Jean-Martial Kouamé, the Institute’s director. Through my research, I developed a basic lexicon of Queer vocabulary, called Woubikan, used by Queer Ivorians to talk about their lives without straight people understanding them. As I did so, I also undertook an ethnography of Queer life in Abidjan, a city that offers relative freedom for LGBT West Africans. My Woubikan lexicon of 160 words and thirty phrases gave me insights into how Queer Ivorians resist homo- and transphobia. Through Prof. Hellweg’s colleague, Igor Coffi, I also contacted several Queer Ivorian NGOs, including ONG DADI, ONG Katia, Organisation Jovial, and Qet Inclusion. I then undertook fourteen hours of semi-structured, focused life-history interviews with my contacts as well as additional focus groups, asking interviewees about the struggles and triumphs of their professional, religious, and romantic lives.
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