link: American Anthropologist 123(4)

In this reflexive commentary, I consider the forms of writing that we use to differentiate expert knowledge or theory from "data". I link the politics of (interlocutor) acknowledgment to the politics of citation, to refuse to reproduce extractive disciplinary models of knowledge production.

link: Unsetting Queer Anthropology

Does Queer Theory + Ethnography = Queer Anthropology? This chapter reframes the canonical origin story of queer anthropology by disrupting the hierarchical binary of queer theory (from the humanities, and purportedly universal, unsituated, portable) and ethnographic data (from the social sciences, and particular, emplaced, a-theoretical) to show not only that queer theory depends on prior queer anthropology, but also that queer theory’s disavowal of empiricism has effaced both its own historical situatedness and its accountability to its subjects and sources. Aiming to dislodge the universalist aspirations that produce queer theory’s canonical white-and American-ness, I read a genealogy of situated, queerly empirical theory back in to queer theory.

link: Feminist Anthropology 3(2)

What is "queer" in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this conceptual review, I explore queer as a political-intellectual orientation and aspirational field animated by its constitutive polarity: between a more constrained queer focused on sex, sexuality, and gender and a more expansive queer that bears an oblique relationship to these more proper objects. Throughout, I reflect on anthropology's place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.

link: Anthropological Quarterly 93(1)

This article explores ethnographic intimacy beyond an identitarian focus on sex, sexual identity, and sex-desire by reflecting on three of my own fieldwork projects in queer anthropology. Bringing queer, decolonizing, postcolonial, and critical race theory into conversation with reflexive work on sex in/and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that broadening our conceptions of intimacy enables us to think less about sex in the field and more about sex as a field—a field of encounters, relationalities, and entanglements that connects us queerly to others. I suggest that such approaches to ethnographic knowledge might disrupt anthropology's colonial object relations by embracing a critical intimacy of interrelationality—staying with, rather than foreclosing, reifying, or trying to master, the overwhelming aspects of both sex and ethnography.

link: Sexualities 24(5-6)

A personal reflection on the histories of cultural analysis of BDSM and BDSM theory

link: Cultural Anthropology 31(4)

Queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—and instead signify anti-normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity. But queer has never quite moved beyond identity. In this essay, I explore queer’s relation first to identity, then antinormativity, and finally to the future-facing possibility I call desire that marks much recent work. Rather than offer a linear history, I argue that these three concepts—identity, normativity, and desire—are constitutive tensions in the past, present, and future of queer anthropology. I suggest that it is the frustration of the desires we invest in our objects that makes for a queer anthropology—and that makes anthropology queer.

link: Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.)

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.

link: New Labor Forum 24(3)

Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, research shows that queer and gender non-conforming people are more vulnerable to poverty than their straight and cisgendered counterparts. Yet this myth is sustained by the mainstream LGBT movement and too often shared by the progressive and activist labor movement. It is a particularly destructive myth for labor organizers because LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in low-wage service sectors. The concept of queer precarity centers LGBT/Q lives, as genders, sexualities, and orientations intersect with the lived realities of class and race. This essay seeks to develop a new political vision that centers sexuality, gender and desire in our movements for social and economic justice.