Queer Studies Under Ethnography's Sign

In this essay, I use the occasion of three excellent queer ethnographies to reflect on the continuing marginalization of anthropology in queer studies. I wish to advance the argument that anthropology can offer queer studies much more than empirical data. The three works discussed illustrate how anthropology's largely unrealized contribution to queer studies is to provide truly situated knowledges that destabilize still-unacknowledged parochialisms of queer theory itself. ¹ This is of particular use in addressing questions of transnationalism and postcoloniality, since the three greatest barriers to an informed theory of queer globalization remain: (1) equating globalization with activists, tourists, and jet-setting elites, when in fact such persons may not be indicative of broader processes; (2) equating culture with locality; and (3) producing discordances by projecting Euro-American theoretical frameworks—including frameworks of ethnicity/race and gender/sexuality—onto other contexts.

In the current moment no one, it seems, thinks interdisciplinarity is bad, a discursive seamlessness that makes me wonder what is really at stake in a relation of abjection toward disciplines. My impression is that valorizing interdisciplinarity is far more prevalent in the humanities than elsewhere: in that universe interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity typically implies a discordance between training and object of study, most often someone trained in literature discussing nontextual or popular-culture artifacts: cartoons, performances, video, and so on. ² The citation networks and the methodologies remain largely unchanged, the metaphorical construal of objects of study as "texts" sufficing as theoretical mandate.

In asking after the place of anthropology in queer studies, I have in mind the contribution of anthropological ethnography as a mutually constituting triad of method, data, and theory. This includes long-term participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, archival research, and other methods oriented around a historically and spatially specific field site (though this "specificity" may include multiple locales, translocal spatial formations like the nation-state, or nonspatial locales like cyberspace). The situated data produced through ethnography blurs the distinction between data and theory: anthropologists make their own archives. ³ Obviously, anthropology does not have all the answers or even all the questions: all methods (like all theories and all bodies of data) are perspectival, partial insights into the human project. Perspectivalism and partiality are, however, the effect of certain modes of knowledge production that always hold out the agglutinative possibility of more angles on the topic or more perspectives on a problem: "'Partial' captures the nature of the interlocution well, for not only is there no totality, each part also defines a partisan position. Ethnographic truths are similarly partial in being at once incomplete and committed." ⁴ One of the most productive crises in contemporary anthropology has been the exhaustion of a mode of knowledge that sees partiality as a failure to be redressed through more context; as a result, I do not want to argue that ethnography offers still more "perspectives." Rather, I hold out the possibility that disciplinarity can further the goals of queer studies toward a different effect, which one might call an effect of accountability: as Marilyn Strathern notes, there is a "need to conserve the division of labor between disciplines, if only because the value of a discipline is precisely in its ability to account for its conditions of existence and thus as to how it arrives at its knowledge practices." ⁵

The three books under review are all easily recognizable to anthropologists as ethnographies in the classic sense. Given the Euro-American character of queer studies, it is likely readers from that tradition will be familiar with—at best—Manalansan's book, since it is set in the United States. ⁶ Yet all three works provide important interventions in queer studies as a theoretical...