Intimate Encounters: Queer Entanglements in Ethnographic Fieldwork

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.