Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

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 “ 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 "Not only is [ Unsettling Queer Anthropology ] disruptive and innovative but it is creative, inspiring, and a genuinely great read."― Maria Murad , Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 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 .