Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

by Margot Weiss (Editor)

Overview

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life.

Contributors. Jafari Sinclair Allen, Tom Boellstorff, Erin L. Durban, Elijah Adiv Edelman, Lyndon K. Gill, K. Marshall Green, Brian A. Horton, Nikki Lane, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Shaka McGlotten, Scott L. Morgensen, Kwame Otu, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Lucinda Ramberg, Sima Shakhsari, Savannah Shange, Anne Spice, Margot Weiss, Ara Wilson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478059400
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University and the author of Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality.

Table of Contents

Preface. you’re invited: a playlist for errant ethnographers / Savannah Shange  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures / Margot Weiss  1
Part I. Foundations: Queer Anthropology’s Contested Genealogies
1. The Anthropology of “What Is Utterly Precious”: Black Feminist Habits of Mind and the Object (and Ends) of Anthropology / Jafari Sinclaire Allen
2. Queer Theories from Somewhere: Situated Knowledges and Other Queer Empiricisms / Margot Weiss  53
3. Intimate Methods: Reflections on Racial and Colonial Legacies within Sexual Social Science / Scott L. Morgensen  77
Part II. Reorientations: Queering the Anthropological Canon
4. Kinship and Kinmaking Otherwise / Lucinda Ramberg  99
5. Pronoun Trouble: Notes on Radical Gender Inclusion in English / Tom Boellstorff  116
6. Stylization in the Flesh: Queer Anthropology and Performance / Brian A. Horton  133
7. Worldly Power and Local Alterity: Transnational Queer Anthropology / Ara Wilson  152
8. Queer States: Geopolitics and Queer Anthropology / Sima Shakhsari  169
Part III. Departures: Reworlding Queer Anthropology
9. Black Queer Anthropology Roundtable: Speculations on Activating Ethnographic Practice in and for Community / Shaka McGlotten and Lyndon Gill, Marshall Green, Nikki Lane, and Kwame Otu  191
10. The Subject of Trans Lives and Vitalities: Queer and Trans Anthropological Object-Making / Elijah Adiv Edelman  209
11. Doing It Together: A Queer Case for Cripping Ethnography / Erin L. Durban  227
12. When Our Tulips Speak Together: More-Than-Human Queer Natures / Juno Salazar Parreñas  247
13. Queer (Re)generations: Disrupting Apocalypse Time / Anne Spice  266
14. The Queer Endotic: Experiments on the Infra-ordinary (Or seeds for a worlding) / Martin F. Manalansan IV  283
Contributors  299
Index  305
 

Editorial Reviews

Unsettling Queer Anthropology offers a constellation of views of queer anthropology, from the mess, beauty, violences, and vitality that constitute it. The contributors engage throughout with queerness as object, method, mode of inquiry, ethos, and intellectual orientation. This book demonstrates that queer anthropology is always unsettling itself, always striving and gladly failing, always aspirationally queer.”—Naisargi N. Davé, author of, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being

“If you think you know queer anthropology, think again: Margot Weiss and the contributors to this volume shake up, mess with, and reinvigorate conversations about the possibilities and limits of queer anthropology for the twenty-first century. Unsettling Queer Anthropology is a timely, vital, and very necessary read for anyone engaged in queer and/or anthropological studies.”—David A.B. Murray, author of, Real Queer?: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus

"This collection is a must-read for anyone working within—or considering working within—queer anthropology, engaging with queer theory, or exploring research questions related to queerness."—Susan Harper, Gender & Society

"Unsettling Queer Anthropology is a whirlwind of queer genealogies, orientations, and possibilities. The volume is profoundly vibrant and at times humorous, engaging with how anthropologists might queer the methods, theories, and orientations that guide us, as we continuously examine the discipline’s colonial legacies and contemporary ableism. . . . editor Margot Weiss and the contributing authors provide us with a very real sense that queer anthropology is wildly alive, still finding new untrodden paths, difficult terrains, and places to plant the seeds of a feral garden."—Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard, Ethnos

From the Publisher

If you think you know queer anthropology, think again: Margot Weiss and the contributors to this volume shake up, mess with, and reinvigorate conversations about the possibilities and limits of queer anthropology for the twenty-first century. Unsettling Queer Anthropology is a timely, vital, and very necessary read for anyone engaged in queer and/or anthropological studies.

Real Queer?: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus - David A.B. Murray

"Unsettling Queer Anthropology is a whirlwind of queer genealogies, orientations, and possibilities. The volume is profoundly vibrant and at times humorous, engaging with how anthropologists might queer the methods, theories, and orientations that guide us, as we continuously examine the discipline’s colonial legacies and contemporary ableism. . . . editor Margot Weiss and the contributing authors provide us with a very real sense that queer anthropology is wildly alive, still finding new untrodden paths, difficult terrains, and places to plant the seeds of a feral garden."

Ethnos - Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard

"This collection is a must-read for anyone working within—or considering working within—queer anthropology, engaging with queer theory, or exploring research questions related to queerness."

Gender & Society - Susan Harper

Unsettling Queer Anthropology offers a constellation of views of queer anthropology, from the mess, beauty, violences, and vitality that constitute it. The contributors engage throughout with queerness as object, method, mode of inquiry, ethos, and intellectual orientation. This book demonstrates that queer anthropology is always unsettling itself, always striving and gladly failing, always aspirationally queer.

Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being - Naisargi N. Davé