How do you teargas a baddie?! Liberation notes on the speculative, communization and ‘baddie-ism' as insurgent praxes in Kenya's #RejectFinanceBill protests

Homed in future anthropologies and anchored in the speculative as a temporal orientation, this paper ventures back to the 2024 #RejectFinanceBill protests from a liberated future Kenya. Grounded methodologically in autoethnography, the piece maps the protests as a conjunctural moment that reconstituted and expanded imaginaries of freedom through insurgent praxes emerging out of, and oriented queerly in, the space–time of protest; potent interventions that contributed to our eventual economic and political liberation. These insurgent praxes being: (a) communization through prefigurative politics of care in both the virtual and physical space–time of protest, and (b), the materialization of a new political subject category – the ‘baddie’. Overarchingly, queer modes of being and doing that permeated, beckoned, pressed – powerful invitations to transforming the world. Throughout, hope is deployed as both an analytical orientation and affective stance; with liberation as a foregone conclusion, this is an exploration of how, not if, we got free.