This series brings together a cohort of anthropologists to reflect on queer anthropology as a historically situated intellectual formation and research community. Rather than diagnosing the status of queer anthropology in the present, our project here is to see how queered analytics can evolve, change, and morph in productive ways in anthropologists' subsequent projects. The contributors, including the two of us, conducted dissertation research and wrote first books that drew on a genealogy of queer anthropology and hoped to further those discussions, even if “queer” was not necessarily a unifying term for us or our interlocutors. While retaining multiple and ongoing interests in queer anthropology, we have all since engaged in research projects that might not seem obviously “queer.” In these essays, we discuss how our later projects have been intimately informed by our earlier research and by queer anthropology, more broadly. We also explore how this parallel dynamic in our own careers speaks to questions of knowledge production and reproduction, and thus to alternate models of futurity and collaboration. Like other anthropologists who have experimented with substantive shifts in their research trajectories, we are interested in the coherences and disjunctures, the payoffs and risks of such turns. We are less concerned here with pandisciplinary paradigm shifts than we are in the incremental ways that our conceptual work can find new coordinates and be mobilized in new ethnographic contexts. The series concludes with a question by Bruno Latour, posed at the American Anthropological Association meetings where these reflections were originally presented. With his kind permission, we have included this question and added brief responses by each of us.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: The Production and Reproduction of Queer Anthropology

Introduction: The Production and Reproduction of Queer Anthropology

Historically, anthropologists have paid a high price for conducting dissertation research on a queer topic. With some notable exceptions like Esther Newton’s (1... More

Resisting a Straight Narrative: The Politics of Visibility Beyond (My) Identity Politics

Resisting a Straight Narrative: The Politics of Visibility Beyond (My) Identity Politics

I thought I would begin by explaining the connections I see between my last book-length project—researching the difference that access to digital technologies c... More

Porous Pleasures

Porous Pleasures

My queered anthropological life began on the streets of San Francisco and from there traveled south to Nicaragua, where I studied the postrevolutionary struggle... More

Queer Respites

Queer Respites

My first book was about queer activism in India. And because I have no imagination at all, the book was actually called Queer Activism in India (Dave 2012). Now... More

Emergent Coherences

Emergent Coherences

Life is long, and not everyone researches one thing their whole life. We all know anthropologists who work in one fieldsite for their entire career, and others ... More

Modern Desires in Urban Nigeria

Modern Desires in Urban Nigeria

I am a member of the generation of scholars who were able to do dissertation projects and first book projects on topics that were, in one way or another, queer.... More

The Messy Itineraries of Queerness

The Messy Itineraries of Queerness

I have always been suspicious of an overemphasis on the “new” in assessing and evaluating research. Instead, I also look to enduring questions, continuities, an... More

Autobiography, Queer Time, and the Future

Autobiography, Queer Time, and the Future

Maddeningly, I missed all but the last few minutes of this conversation, due not so much to queer time as to Google time, which moved all my calendar appointmen... More

A Question from Bruno Latour

A Question from Bruno Latour

I would like to know how the “no future” in the title of your roundtable currently resonates with queer anthropology. You have mentioned something that is very ... More