Imagined, Desired: Coming of Age with Queer Ethnographies

It has been fifteen years since the publication of Kath Weston’s essay “Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology.” We have more than transcended her astute observation that there was a time when researchers, especially anthropologists, rushed to gather data and left theory for a rainy day in efforts to build the base of the emerging field of what is today regularly called queer studies.¹ It is well known that Weston’s review marked a significant moment in the fields of queer studies and anthropology. Among other things, its inclusion in the Annual Review of Anthropology represented “an institutionalizing move” on the part of the anthropological community to contribute to “the theory explosion” in queer studies.² In addition, Weston was instrumental in reminding anthropologists and other interested parties that the time had also come “to develop approaches to the study of gendering and sexuality that can deal with the diasporas and the fragmentation and reconfiguration of identities that . . . characterized the late twentieth century.”³ Ten years later, Martin Manalansan’s book Global Divas was one response to Weston’s challenge.⁴ Manalansan asked two vital questions: “Who gets to see globalization and in what way? For whom and to whom does this vision of queer globalization speak?”⁵ Further, Manalansan noted that a “‘new queer studies’” was emerging from the margins of the academy, where scholars in “ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, women’s studies, and gay and lesbian studies” demonstrated a collective “investment in a progressive understanding of globalization and transnationalism.”⁶

Based on the three impressive books included in this review, it is clear that LGBTQ anthropology has indeed come of age, bringing with it insights into new formations and the hegemonic power of nation-states in a neoliberal age. Current global/transnational queer studies locate how that which is queer actively participates in constructing the nation-state and the politics and economics of globalization. In recent years, indeed, queer studies has seen a boom in research on queer subjects and subjectivities in global and transnational contexts, much of it anthropological. The three queer ethnographic projects under review are all exemplary models of this new direction in progressive queer studies and progressive anthropology. In addition, all three make significant theoretical contributions on numerous fronts. The locales from which their data have been gathered have been neglected or ignored in mainstream queer studies and generally in the academy in the United States. They also offer exciting and intriguing methodological possibilities for both queer studies and anthropology.

Further, using one of Tom Boellstorff’s arguments, these texts anthropologize queer studies in that they work to humanize our understandings of this global moment where transnationalism and neoliberalism unevenly affect and (re)produce queerness, what it means to be queer, and even how queer cultures form or dissolve at unprecedented rates and often in very unexpected ways, constantly challenging notions of essentialism and broadening the interdisciplinarity of queer studies. As Lisa Rofel documents, new kinds of human beings are emerging in a “new human era,” an era in which insights and understandings of nonheterohegemonic genders and sexualities hold great possibility not only for new scholarship within and across disciplines but for building new forms of activism and social justice movements. This new moment, then, is one of possibilities or, as Boellstorff might argue, of coincidences, which holds promise and even danger.

In addition to their theoretical contributions, these works significantly contribute to a particular queering of anthropology. Though queer subject matter is still marginalized in the discipline, the practice of queer ethnographic methods, the queering of ancestral theorists’ works, and the (re)reading of data through queer lenses mark a shift in anthropology. Minority sexualities and genders can no longer be dehumanized, denied, deflected...