LGBTQI+ people on the move: victimization, perception and strategies against gender-based violence in Manizales, Colombia

Everyday mobility is a key site where gendered power relations are lived, negotiated, and contested. For LGBTQI+ people, moving through the city can generate moments of joy and freedom while also demanding vigilance, self-monitoring, and navigation of gender-based violence (GBV). Drawing on feminist and queer geographic scholarship, this paper examines how experiences of violence and insecurity shape the everyday mobilities of LGBTQI+ people in Manizales, Colombia, a conservative medium-sized city (100,000 to 1 million inhabitants) where their visibility is heightened and anonymity limited. Using a combination of interviews and survey data, we explore how study participants perceive safety across public spaces and public transport, how they distinguish between frequent “mild” forms of harassment and less common but more severe incidents, and how these experiences inform adaptive mobility practices over time. The paper makes two contributions. First, it advances understandings of GBV, by foregrounding its temporal and cumulative character within everyday mobility and showing how repeated and normalized forms of harassment—such as stares and catcalling—reshape spatial practices in the absence of more severe violence. Second, it contributes to queer mobilities scholarship by conceptualizing adaptive practices—such as changing dress, modifying routes, learning self-defence, and travelling accompanied—as forms of relational agency enacted under constraint. By focusing on a medium-sized Latin American city, the paper challenges metropolitan and Global North biases in queer mobilities research and highlights how vulnerability and agency coexist in everyday movement.