Feminist Anthropology 2022 DOI: 10.1002/fea2.

12084

Queer Theory from Elsewhere and the

Im/Proper Objects of Queer
Anthropology
Margot Weiss1

1 Anthropology and American Studies, Wesleyan University, 255 High Street, Middletown,
Connecticut, 06459-0146, United States

What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, 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. I trace how the desire to do justice
to our objects of study produces queer’s characteristic inversions, so that when we seek to move
“beyond” queer’s proper objects, we find ourselves drawn back into them and inversely, when we
seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves elsewhere and otherwise. I illuminate this
queer movement through a conceptual review of recent scholarship in queer anthropology (loosely
2015-21), drawing out queer as (1) a challenge to categorical legibility, (2) a way to rethink vitalities
between bio- and necropolitics, (3) a field of political, social, and sensual erotics and desires, and
(4) a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects and epistemologies. Throughout, I reflect on
anthropology’s place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.

Keywords queer, transnational, elsewhere, theory, epistemology, desire

“What’s queer about queer studies now?”

—David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Muñoz (2005, 1)

“What is left of queer now?”

—David Eng and Jasbir K. Puar (2020, 2)

“What’s queer in queer anthropology today?” I posed this question in 2016, and here we are
again (Weiss 2016a, 628). Is there another field that, since its emergence in the early 1990s, has
generated so much panic around its definitional lack? What is queer, we ask incessantly in our
symposia, panels, essays, and state-of-the-field special issues, now, or now, or . . . now? Yes, this
is part of the novelty-pitched mechanics of the neoliberal, multicultural, entrepreneurial academy.
But queer also energizes something more specific: an essential nonreferentiality and yet constant
(if futile) call for definition, the demand to recharacterize that lives alongside the feeling that we
have never quite nailed it down. Queer is less a term than a force field, an epistemological form that,

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in seeking to open new horizons of knowledge, instantiates other forms of closure. Indeed, as I have
written previously, queer indexes that desire to reach beyond theoretical or conceptual closure to
an elsewhere, the frustration when one’s desires are thwarted, and then the return and reopening
of new horizons (Weiss 2016a, 2016b; see also Wiegman 2012).1
So it is by doubling down on my own affective attachment to queer that I begin yet
another of these endeavors. When I was invited to reflect on how queer has been deployed in
recent anthropology in an annual review-type essay for Feminist Anthropology, I felt completely
overwhelmed.2 Given the expansive reach and sheer quantity of new scholarship in the field, how
could I ever do justice to queer? But as I reflected, I realized that rather than a straight review, I
wanted to try to illuminate queer as a prompt, provocation, pleasure, and promise in contemporary
queer anthropology.3 I wanted, in other words, not only to explore recent work in queer anthropology
but also to consider queer less as a key term and more as an affective, political, and intellectual
mobilization of precisely that desire to do justice to it—even as that desire, when it returns to us in
the form of our academic work, must always fall short.
The canonical origin story of queer studies opens with the conference organized on “Queer
Theory” by Teresa de Lauretis in 1990 and the subsequent special issue of the feminist cultural
studies journal differences. In that volume’s hopeful introduction, de Lauretis wonders if queer
might provide a “conceptual and speculative” opening: might “our queerness act as an agent of
social change,” she asked, “and our theory construct . . . another way of living the racial and the
sexual?” (1991, iii, xi). This aspiration, a desiring orientation that links the political to the intellectual,
continues to characterize queer studies today. (I define queer studies as an interlinking albeit
disciplinary field of study organized around queer, which includes queer anthropology.) For instance,
Martin Manalansan describes queer anthropology as “an aspirational field of inquiry” (2016, 596),
cultivating among its practitioners a “desiring orientation” toward not only “what it is but also . . .
what it can be” (597). And if this reach toward an otherwise is frustrated—as, indeed, it must always
be4 —that frustration galvanizes new speculations, attempts to find queerer ways to think, theorize,
and live.
From its start, queer as a political-intellectual desire has taken shape through a distinctive
and constitutive polarity. Writing during the 1990s cultural war on queer teens in the aftermath
of HIV/AIDS (queer necropolitics avant la lettre), feminist foremother Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
points to queer as emerging between what she terms “universalizing” and “minoritizing” impulses
(1990, 1). On the one hand, Sedgwick lauds new work that “spins the term [queer] outward along
dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all”—naming race, ethnicity,
postcolonial nationality, language, and state as some of those dimensions (1993, 9). Yet at the
same time, Sedgwick warns that displacing same-sex desire from queer’s definitional center would
“dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself” (8). This both/and of expansion/contraction is, in
my reading, the formative condition of queer—one that, even as it has morphed over the past thirty
years, continues to animate queer studies.5
My aim in this essay, however, is neither to choose a side nor to resolve this fundamental
tension between, on the one hand, a focus on same-sex-desiring subjects (and, sometimes, gender
transgression)6 and, on the other, a refusal to center these more “proper objects” of queer (Butler
1994). Instead, I seek to show how it is queer’s animating polarity that activates the field’s
aspirations, so that, when we seek to move “beyond” queer’s proper objects, we find ourselves drawn
back into them and, inversely, when we seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves

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elsewhere and otherwise. I take the occasion of this essay to queerly illuminate the ways this polarity
works in contemporary queer anthropology.
I start by developing queer’s constitutive tension by juxtaposing recent influential arguments
in queer studies (in and outside anthropology proper) about what sort of elsewhere we should
be seeking in queer. The “elsewhere” of my title thus both refers to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K.
Puar’s call for a queer theory from elsewhere (2016)—one that rejects the conceptual prioritization
of Western concepts of gender and sexuality—and also to a more affective investment in queer,
what José Esteban Muñoz calls an “educated mode of desiring” (2009, 1) that might do justice to
queer life in the world now, and the one to come. I aim to clarify the stakes of these arguments
politically and intellectually, which also means tending to their unlikely resonances—the way they
are similarly fueled by the aspirational desire to find an elsewhere/otherwise adequate to their own
political terrain.
The second part of the essay traces queer’s elsewhere within contemporary queer anthropology.
I focus on work published since 2015, and rather than following a standard review format (organized
through area, for instance, or subfield), I organize the field conceptually. I take up four major ways
that queer moves within anthropology: queer as a challenge to categorical legibility, queer as a way
to rethink vitality and the bio- and necropolitics of the human, queer and/as desire, and queer as
a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects. Throughout, I highlight queer’s characteristic
inversions: how, in seeking to move beyond sex, sexuality, and gender, queer often returns to them;
and how, in seeking to center same-sex-desiring (and gender-transgressing) subjects, queer often
finds itself otherwise. This, I argue, is the heart of queer—not something to adjudicate or get
“beyond” in a search for better proper objects (or a new queer) but something to embrace as the
field’s generative core.
A tonal note as we begin: Because I am interested in a capacious reading not only of queer
anthropology but also the larger intellectual field of inquiry that queer mobilizes for its divergent
practitioners (including myself), I attend to affective and conceptual interconnections rather than
boundary-making disciplinary conflict. I begin with a queer that is transnational and intersectional,
not one that has (finally) arrived there7 ; I situate queer anthropology as already in conversation
with feminist, queer/trans, Indigenous, critical race, Black, and diaspora studies; and I try to avoid
an anthropology-knows-best tone, which can sometimes short-circuit intellectual connection. My
object is epistemological, rather than prescriptive—an exploration of the queries, stakes, objects, and
concepts that queer illuminates. This is also to say that, even as I challenge the wholesale rejection
of queer theory by some anthropologists, I also reject the assertation too often made in the more
English-y corridors of our universities that ethnography is only ever colonialist. Instead, this essay is
in alignment with the critique of totalizing, documentarian forms of knowing-as-owning, what Kath
Weston called “ethnocartography” (1993) and Tom Boellstorff called the “logic of enumeration”
(2007b). (Ethnocartography is mapping as knowing, and the logic of enumeration is naming as
knowing; both regularize the gaze on an other as object and frontier.) Indeed, ethnocartography
today is more properly understood as a reading practice performed by those seeking to confine
queer anthropology itself to the data slot, a field that can provide only local case studies, rather
than theorizations from elsewhere (see also Macharia 2016). And finally, I try to resist a generic
demand to stake out a new take on queer. Instead, I let my own affective political-intellectual
attachment to queer as an epistemological form guide me: seeking not the satisfaction of conclusion
but the stretched-out opening; ironic reversals that galvanize new possibilities; and desires that are
rerouted, remapped, and made strange on the journey.

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Queer’s Central Contradiction: The Im/Proper Objects of Transnational

Queer Studies
By the mid-2000s, queer studies had fully embraced its transnational turn. In 2005, David L. Eng,
Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz took the occasion of their field-defining special issue of
Social Text, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” to chart a path for queer studies beyond
what they snarkily described as too often sounding “like a metanarrative about the domestic affairs
of white homosexuals” (12). Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz called for a queer that would attend to
the urgent “global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the
geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies”
(1). Pointing to women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and queer diasporas as central
theoretical sites, their queer would now take up race, transnationalism, global capitalism, diaspora,
immigration, citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics (3)8 —topics strikingly central to the
anthropological canon.
Although Manalansan is the only anthropologist to feature in that special issue, queer
anthropology was flourishing by the mid-2000s. For instance, Lisa Rofel’s (2007) Desiring China
situated Beijing’s gay community in transnational, post-socialist China, exploring questions of
neoliberalism and queer in/as translation (a topic of abiding interest in queer anthropology). Rofel’s
work is part of a wave of queer anthropology—including Manalansan (2003), Boellstorff (2005,
2007a), and Wekker (2006), among others—that centered racialization, nation, religion, colonialism,
and global capitalism in their intersections with sexuality and gender, exploring queer from a
vigorously global perspective. So by 2005 or so, even with methodological and disciplinary divides,
transnational queer studies had, in seeking a queer studies from elsewhere, charted a field organized
around the critique of a purportedly universalized subject of sexuality, and begun to explore the
complex intersections of sexuality (and gender) with emplaced global histories of racialization,
nationalisms, capitalism, and colonialism.
Yet the central tension of queer—between a more diffuse queer that points “beyond” gender
and sexuality and one that is centered on same-sex-desiring subjects (and gender transgression)—
has, if anything, only been sharpened in the transnational turn. Take, as one measure, the annual
Ruth Benedict Prize, awarded by the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) for best book in
queer anthropology. In 2020, the prize was awarded to Ana-Mauríne Lara’s Queer Freedom : Black
Sovereignty, Sarah Luna’s Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US
Border, and Paul Boyce, EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, and Silvia Posocco’s Queering Knowledge: Analytics,
Devices, and Investments after Marilyn Strathern—each of which I discuss in this essay, and none of
which bear a simple relationship to queer (or take the term as reducible to LGBT identities).9 Instead,
queer raises questions of decolonizing erotics, polyamorous methodology, or Strathernian partial
connections. Indeed, in the past ten years of the prize, even as AQA has celebrated work on topics
such as queer life in Trinidad and Tobago (Gill 2018), trans facial feminization surgery (Plemons
2017), class and cosmopolitanism in gay Manila (Benedicto 2014), and queer families in Taiwan
(Brainer 2019)—all seemingly proper objects—it has also honored work that takes up im/properly
queer topics and analytics, such as goddess marriage (Ramberg 2014), pansexual BDSM (Weiss
2011a), and heterosexual sex tourism (Meiu 2017). To delve deeper into this central polarity, I turn
to two recent and influential articulations of queer’s elsewhere, chosen not only for their clarity but
also because each deftly forefronts the political-intellectual stakes of their desire for queer as a way
to do justice to their objects.

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Perhaps the most influential contemporary argument for a queer that points beyond gender and
sexuality is articulated in the very latest state-of-the-field special issue of Social Text, David Eng and
Jasbir K. Puar’s 2020 “Left of Queer.” In their introduction, Eng and Puar return to Eng, Halberstam,
and Muñoz’s 2005 argument for a “subjectless” queer theory—one that would refuse a “proper
subject of or object for the field” (such as sexuality or desire) since “queer has no fixed political
referent” (Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005, 3).10 To this subjectless queer, Eng and Puar call for a
new “objectless” critique. Seeking to loosen “queer theory’s attachment to the sexual subject” they
urge a deeper exploration of the “biopolitical sorting of populations” into life, death, and nonlife,
asking which queer subjects/objects are left “outside the political, economic, and cultural mandates
of the sovereign nation-state and the liberal individual as its prized citizen-subject” (Eng and Puar
2020, 16, 17, 5). This new queer is necessarily nonreferential, as, Eng and Puar argue, the sexual
subject is the paradigmatic subject of recognition in an age of neoliberal human rights, marking
the divide between “‘civilized’ and ‘barbaric’ cultures” (7). Eng and Puar’s queer is keyed to today’s
geopolitical landscapes of permanent war, in the context of liberal projects of governance.
This intervention builds on Puar’s previous work with anthropologist Maya Mikdashi calling for
a queer theory from elsewhere, a call to dislodge the US as “arbiter and funnel for the legibility
of theory elsewhere” (2016, 216). Mikdashi and Puar offer counterexamples of normativity and
corporality drawn from the transnational Middle East, such as what Puar (2017) has theorized as
“debilitation” or quotidian Israeli state practices of shooting to maim, bodily toxicities, and the
erosion of water, health, and electric infrastructures. Mikdashi and Puar ask: Are the bodies that
result from such deprivations queer? What about populations denied “‘normal’ maturation into
adulthood” (2016, 220)? As long as “part of the project of homonationalism is to produce and
stabilize transnational, imperial, and settler colonial forms of sexual and gendered injury,” they
argue, a queer studies that takes as its foundation “a sexual or gendered body or a sexual or
gendered injury” necessarily reinforces US epistemologies—“queer theory as American studies,”
as they put it (220, 215).11 In this intervention, instead of proper objects (gender, sexuality, sexed
bodies), queer must be divested of its “obsession and commitment to the sexualized human form”
to focus on the biopolitical and material grounds that condition the emergence of any proper object
(221).
I want to pause here to underline that this subjectless/objectless queer is calibrated to be
accountable and do justice to forms of suffering and life that might not immediately register as
properly queer—even, as I argue more fully below, as “objectless” critique often returns to or
touches down on more properly queer objects (such as nonnormative life course or queered/crip
embodiments). Against NGO (nongovernmental organization) imaginaries of LGBT empowerment
and bifurcated geopolitical exceptionalisms—a primitive and subordinated queered other there, a
modern and liberated gay subject here—a subjectless/objectless queer moves against liberal regimes
of recognition, including those of the academy. And many (including anthropologists discussed
below) have found this provocation useful, as to refuse queer’s proper objects—gender, sexuality,
the sexed (human) body—might allow us to think an elsewhere/otherwise unfixed from US-centered
categories and thus potentially more accountable to urgent political realities.
I contrast this call for a subjectless/objectless queer to the call for a queer that centers emplaced,
same-sex-desiring (gay, lesbian, queer), speaking subjects. Perhaps the strongest contemporary
argument for this comes from Lyndon K. Gill, in the conclusion to his 2018 ethnography Erotic
Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. Gill offers a sensitive rejoinder to Puar on the
problem of transnational queer. He begins by agreeing with Puar that we must reject the false

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universalization of an older (“traditional”) gay and lesbian anthropology as the search for a “gay
presence” elsewhere (207). But, he argues, even as we must contest “the parochial fetishization of
sexual-object choice . . . over and above various other tender sites for potentially non/antinormative
subject positioning” (207), we must also be wary of perspectives that elide same-sex-desiring
subjects:

If queerness is determined by a reading practice that resists sexual-object choice and seeks to
discover the nonnormative in an “elsewhere” not necessarily defined by same-sex desire, then
there emerges the threat that queer ethnography could very well lose sight of same-sex-desiring
communities altogether. . . . In our rush to mark the distended limits of queerness—vital though
this stretch may be—we must not allow same-sex-desiring and gender nonconforming subjects to
sit silently on the page while theorists court queerness of various other sorts. (207-8)

To disrupt the violence of representational abstraction, Gill proposes “artful listening practice as
ethnographic method” (2018, 197). Drawn from Black feminist and queer methods of “interrupting”
the erasure of Black knowledges, this technique instead depicts Black queer people as complexly,
often translocally “situated, speaking subjects” (2012, 33).
To be clear, this is not an approach taken by all scholars working in Black/queer anthropology,
including authors I discuss below. But I want to draw out Gill’s call for queer to serve as a form
of witnessing; rather than a retread of identity politics, this is a call to be accountable to those
erased from history. For instance, Jafari S. Allen situates Black/queer anthropology as a practice
of “ethnographic renarrativization,” in line with Hortense Spillers’s “entreaty to verb Black erotic
experience” and Saidiya Hartman’s “attempts at ‘redressing the violence’ of the archive” (Allen
2016, 624). As he writes, “standard or traditional academic frameworks and optics do not allow us
to see anyone or anything fully enough, or clearly enough” (621). What Allen calls the Black/queer
“decolonizing stream of anthropology”—the stroke connecting queer to Black while unsettling both—
centers marginalized forms of knowledge and knowledge producers: Black, queer, and feminist
artists, writers, activists, and interlocutors (621-22).
I see this approach to queer in Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz’s (2016)
Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism and E. Patrick Johnson’s (2011,
2018, 2019) oral histories of Black gay men and women who love women in the American South—
projects that take the form of ethnographic witnessing in an attempt to preserve the histories,
voices, and perspectives of subjects erased or absent from official archives. As Savannah Shange
writes, ethnographic writing might be a kind of “wake work” (drawing on Sharpe 2016) when it strives
to re/constitute “Black life in the face of Black death” through “caring, seeing, and being in the wake”
(Shange 2019c, 156)—even when these efforts fail.12 And yet Shange points to gaps between gender
and generation that disrupt Black queer kinship (2019b), and Gill highlights his interlocutor’s refusal
to take up the label “lesbian,” preferring instead a “language of ellipses” (2018, 116)—showing us that
centralizing queerly desiring subjects can bring us elsewhere, into incommensurate registers.
In drawing out the form that queer’s constitutive polarity takes within interdisciplinary,
transnational queer studies, I press on the political-intellectual resonance between these poles—the
way both share the aspirational desire for a queer that might do justice to one’s objects, a queer that
might adequately theorize from (and to) elsewhere. And again, I am not positioning anthropology as
always on the side of speaking subjects and queer theory on the side of anti-humanistic geopolitics—
theory vs. ethnography (aka, data). Instead, these are the reversals that power the field: an objectless

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queer that, nevertheless, touches down in recognizably “queer” topics and, conversely, a subject-
centered queer that finds itself otherwise to any simple or stable category of sexuality/gender.
In what follows, I explore how this polarity takes shape in recent queer anthropology, with
attention to queer’s desiring resonances and conceptual inversions. I focus on work published
in the past five years, and I follow AQA’s institutional lead in understanding trans as a part of
queer anthropology—even as this partial inclusion is unsatisfactory. Given the political stakes of my
argument, I highlight decolonizing, feminist approaches—indeed, work that explores intersections
of gender/sexual normativities with racialization, global capitalism, Indigeneity, diaspora, and
colonialism is the only kind of queer anthropology I would consider queer. Complexly informed by and
informing feminist, queer, trans, Indigenous, critical race, Black, and diaspora studies in and outside
anthropology, the work I consider asks: What are the proper objects for a queer studies from (and
seeking an) elsewhere? Still, all standard caveats apply: my review is not complete or total, and there
is much I had to omit for the sake of length and focus.
I have organized my review into four conceptual topics: (1) queer’s challenge to categorical
legibility; (2) queer vitalities between bio- and necropolitics; (3) queer erotics as political, social,
and sensual desire; and (4) queer as epistemological deconstruction. These are overlapping and
inexhaustive arenas, chosen because they enable a conceptual reconsideration of queer that, I
hope, will reveal new connections between divergent approaches. Throughout, I trace the doubled
movement of queer as it inverts its constitutive poles—a queer untethered to sexuality (or gender)
and a queer centered on the subjects it names. As I hope to show, this oscillation between expansion
and dilation—between situated localities and abstracted globalities, speaking subjects of desire and
subjectless/objectless analytics, gendered or erotic embodiments and sedimented infrastructures,
life and death, bio- and necropolitics—is the animating field/force of today’s transnational queer.

Queer (and Trans) Anthropology, 2015-2021

The Categories, Themselves: Queer Categorical Legibility
I take my title here from David Valentine’s contribution to the 2004 GLQ forum on gender and
sexuality, which opens with the caution that first we must ask, “Among those human experiences
in which we are interested, which count as ‘gendered’ and which as ‘sexual’? Or, more simply,
what exactly do we mean by ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’?” (215; see also Valentine 2007; Beauchamp
2018). Valentine traces the historical emergence of the category transgender as an epistemological
problem, but I take his question (which points to the problem of language itself) and his call (which
asks us to attend to “the constitution of those categories themselves as a historically located social
practice” [2004, 220]) as foundational for queer anthropology broadly.
Recent Indigenous queer studies has roundly critiqued how queer is tied to orders of Western
legibility. Jenny L. Davis’s work on Two Spirit,13 for instance, takes aim at the idea that there
might be a “right” term or that language and identity categories function as binary either/or, “gay
Indian” or “Two Spirit” (2019, 66). Instead, she maps a both/and Indigenous approach to linguistic
categories of gender and sexuality as “overlapping states”—“complex, multilayered, and, at times,
contradictory” political and discursive practices, as Indigenous people move within and between
specific tribal categories, multitribal Two Spirit, and non-Native settler terminology like gay and
queer (2014, 62). Such simultaneous and multiscalar positioning also entails refusing (in Audra
Simpson’s terms) the reduction of Two Spirit to either gender (trans) or sexuality (queer) as colonial
binaries and settler optics of recognition (Davis 2019, 66-67, 82), rejecting translation as well as
enumeration. Davis’s work refuses the grounds of categorical recognition and coherence; queer

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(and trans) become problematic sites of linguistic “adequation” and “distinction,” both places of
similarity (if not sameness) as well as difference (2019, 74).
Davis might be read alongside Jodi A. Byrd’s retheorization of how the queer in Indigenous
studies “helps us relocate subjectivity and its refusals back into the vectors of ongoing settler
colonialism,” a retheorization of queer’s critique of normativity as its “ground” (2017, 226; see also
Byrd 2020). Davis might also be read alongside Scott L. Morgensen’s (2016) call for queer to “expose
and destabilize colonial conditions of anthropological epistemology and methodology,” refusing
codification as settler colonial knowledge formation (607, 608). As we make knowledge from within
“the epistemic violences conditioning the field of intelligibility within which our accounts emerge”
(609)—both discursive and physical institutions—Morgensen urges anthropologists to refuse queer
as object of study and instead more deeply consider decolonizing and reflexive knowledge practices
and methods.
Serena Owusua Dankwa’s Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in
Postcolonial Ghana (2021) shows the value of this approach in a different arena, as she centers
the epistemological challenge of queer in her work on oblique same-sex desires and intimacies
among women in postcolonial Ghana. She writes, “The epistemological challenge was to identify
women who were intimately involved with each other without assuming either the primacy of their
sexual liaison over other aspects of their friendships or a fixed boundary between sexual and non-
sexual intimacy. This would have privileged and reified ‘sexuality,’ the very category I had set out
to question” (Dankwa 2021, 3). Dankwa’s reading of erotic subjectivities and queer relationalities
challenges universalizing assumptions of sexuality. But neither does she take refuge in any simple
“native” or local term, here supi, “the polyvalent term for an intimate same-sex friend or lover”
(5). As Dankwa writes, “instead of privileging one singular term”—by fixing it as a generic category,
rather than a contingent practice—she focuses on “the metaphors and indirect and poetic ways of
invoking love and friendship, self, and society” that speak to situated subjects while refusing any
simple notion of categorical legibility (278). In this way, Dankwa refuses the demand of naming or
owning—her phrase “knowing women” describes how women come to know same-sex intimacies but
also her attempts to decolonize ethnographic knowledge practices. In Dankwa’s ethnography, queer
is an opening into practice and pedagogy—a site of knowledge production. This queer ethnography
considers (rather than collapses or overcomes) the gap between local categories and other erotic
possibilities—providing a disjunctive, rather than enunciatory, queer.
Sometimes, this gap itself is the focus, as in Evren Savcı’s (2021) ethnography Queer in
Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam, which takes up the shifting terrain of queerness,
morality, and neoliberal Islam in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Savcı draws on translation to
think across East/West, colonial/authentic, modern/traditional, universal/particular, and global/local
binaries that, Savcı argues, structure queer studies’ engagement with neoliberalism on the one
hand and Islam on the other (3). Her focus is not on the vocabulary of identities like gay or
lesbian but rather on the terms of transnational sexual/LGBT politics—gender identity, LGBT rights,
homophobia, or hate crimes—as they circulate through narrative. Analyzing unsettled contradictions
and coalitions between, for instance, Muslim headscarf activism and LGBT rights or violence
against trans sex workers and hate crimes, Savcı employs “translation as a transnational queer
methodology” (24) to disrupt queer theory’s homolingual inscription of the sexual subject.
New work on transnational queer and trans asylum seekers moves questions of translation and
categories in a different direction. David A. B. Murray’s (2015) Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and
Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus unpacks the dynamic ways LGBT,

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homosexual, and gay are used by the state and asylum seekers alike. Murray draws on Puar’s concept
of homonationalism, critiquing what he calls the “queer migration to liberation nation” narrative (3),
while simultaneously showing the ironies of evaluating who among the mostly Caribbean and African
claimants can be a “real queer” or credible SOGI (sexuality orientation or gender identity) refugee
according to Canada’s refugee system. Similarly, B Camminga’s (2019) Transgender Refugees and
the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies focuses attention on
gender refugees to South Africa from other parts of Africa, exploring how the category gender
refugee is interarticulated with the transnational category transgender (see also Dutta and Roy
2014). This work shows how LGBT and transgender are made contingently meaningful as they move
between bodies, narratives, borders, nation states, and languages.
In these ethnographies, queer (and trans) raise new questions of categories and legibility across
various borders, including linguistic ones. Sometimes focused on queer desiring subjects and
intimate pleasures, sometimes focused on cross-border state apparatuses, this work amplifies the
tension between the categories LGBT, gay, homosexual, and transgender and what might exceed,
trouble, or deconstruct them—offering a queer that undermines universalizing epistemologies
of sexed bodies (and gendered subjects) without stabilizing neat oppositions of West/rest or
bracketing shifting geopolitics. In their decolonizing mode, these queer ethnographies give us ways
to think queer differently, theorized from multiple and interlinked elsewheres—Native and settler
US; Switzerland and Ghana; Turkey and the US; Canada, Nigeria, and Jamaica; Western and Eastern
Africa and South Africa.

Vitality: Queer Bios within Necropolitics

My second domain considers queer (and trans) as concepts that move between life and death,
bio- and necropolitics. Analytically, this work attends to the violent bifurcations within (settler)
colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism—how some forms of queerness are erased, debilitated,
or killed, while others are embraced and celebrated—building from Jasbir Puar’s readings of
homonationalism and the biopolitics of debilitation (2007, 2017) and Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman,
and Silvia Posocco’s Queer Necropolitics (2014). My attention to queer as vitality, following Elijah
Adiv Edelman’s (2021) work on trans vitalities, is meant to center life-making under precarious
conditions, as well as the biopolitical operations that take up queer (and trans) to delineate human,
nonhuman, and quasi-human boundaries.
Queer necropolitics focuses on the state of “queer politics” under conditions of racism and
white supremacy, settler colonialism and imperialism, permanent war, mass incarceration and
state killing, border brutalities, and neoliberal deprivation, when a discourse of LGBT rights
and diversity is a primary language of the state (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2014, 1).
Under conditions of deadly inclusion—“militarized queer intimacies, nationalized practices of queer
mourning, assimilationist logics of feminist, gay, and transgender rights, and criminalizing policies in
the name of sexual safety and queer space” (3)—queer is neither identity nor subject nor a stable sign
of anti-normativity (homo- or hetero-), but rather a “marker for a different ontology and a radical
rethinking of how queer politics and capacities might be resituated in the context of structural
violence” (5). Aligned with expansive transnational feminist theory, queer arbitrates between life
that is valued and life deemed disposable (20-21).
Sima Shakhsari (2020) calls this “the politics of rightful killing” in Politics of Rightful Killing:
Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan and in their previous work on Iranian queer
and trans refugees (2014a, 2014b). “Rightful killing” is “death in the name of rights,” where a

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population (in this case, “the people of Iran”) are at once the subject of universal rights and the
target of impending death in the name of those rights (2020, 1, 2). For Shakhsari, queer points to
normalized state violence and its cleavages as well as to various gendered and sexual projects,
including the temporality of queer and trans refugees whose lives and deaths mediate the space
between “oppression and freedom, homophobia and gay rights, backwardness and progress, and
rightlessness and rightfulness” (2014b, 999). Like Savcı’s, Shakhsari’s queer connects questions
of translation to the bio- and necropolitics of rights, rightlessness, and the apparatuses of state
recognition and management.
Elijah Adiv Edelman moves from questions of necropolitics into trans lives in his 2021
ethnography Trans Vitalities: Mapping Ethnographies of Trans Social and Political Coalitions (see also
Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). Drawing on activist work with the Washington, DC trans community,
Edelman describes a necropolitical crisis for trans people facing state violence, assault, harassment,
homelessness, job discrimination, poverty, and an ongoing health crisis. And yet, he writes, even
as “we might be tempted to frame these bodies as unilaterally suffering” or “resilient” (see also
Edelman 2020), he insists on “trans vitalities”—ethnographic attention to the “vitalities emergent
in the wake of death and dying” (Edelman 2021, 139). Edelman sees life-making projects in how
his interlocutors, majority trans feminine and of color, describe networks of relation in the city. In
the face of violence, suffering, and erasure, this focus on vitalities speaks back to the “continued
erasure and disposability of trans feminine bodies of color” (3). Edelman also writes against the
more mundane violences enacted by research, service provision, and activism, from the violence
of “‘community’ to frame an imagined shared experience” (3) to trans as a category created and
reproduced by authorizing knowledges (medical, social service, academic, etc.), to the ways research
is only rarely accountable to its subjects.
A queer emphasis on challenging readings of what Joel Robbins (2013) calls the “suffering
slot” also guides Aimee Meredith Cox’s (2015) work on homeless Black girls in Detroit, Martin
Manalansan’s (2014, 2018) work on queer mess, and Erin Durban’s (2017) work on trans disabled life
in post-earthquake Haiti. Each differently but centrally highlights pleasure, futures, play, fabulosity
(see also Moore 2018), imagination—in short, queer (and trans) life—in the context of marginalization,
abandonment, and precarity. As Manalansan writes, queerness “is not just about off-kilter sex or
nonnormative desires, but is about the potentials and possibilities behind quotidian practices and
struggles of peripheral lives” (2015).
Vitality also speaks to new work on queer as mediating between the human and the other-
than-human. For instance, in Vanessa Agard-Jones’s work on environmental and sexual politics in
Martinique, queer registers obliquely: through the “sands” as a metaphor of the fleeting archives
of same-sex desire, from the volcanic destruction of Saint-Pierre (“Sodom of the Antilles”) to
the present-day cruising at Les Salines beach (2012); and through “spray” and “soil” as ways
to rethink porosity and exposure to toxicities, both the endocrine-disrupting pesticides from the
island’s banana plantations and those embedded in longer colonial histories of racism, sexism,
and homophobia (2013, 2014). Agard-Jones explores the historical accretion of gender and sexual
embodied assemblages, a Black feminist rereading of queer in the long aftermath of the plantation.
Here, queer is an analytic that moves across scales and objects—from Black desire and pleasure; to
sand, soil, and sediment; to the aftermath of colonialism—revealing the entwining of nonlife and life
as social/biological entanglements.
Queer (and trans) are particularly embodied modalities, even as this scholarship pushes queer
away from sexed bodies or human(ist) encounters and toward other assemblages of life, nonlife,

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and quasi-life. In queer ethnographic and ethnographic-adjacent work on human and nonhuman
relations, queer (and trans) works through only to unravel categories of sex and gender, providing
new answers to the query posed by Dana Luciano and Mel Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?”
(2015). For instance, Juno Salazar Parreñas’s (2018) Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care
in Orangutan Rehabilitation takes up “compulsory heterosexuality” to rethink the naturalization
of forced copulation for conservation; while Naisargi Dave’s rereading of animal ethics considers
queer as a becoming otherwise, a challenge to boundaries of commensurability and its categories
of in/difference (2014, 2016). Alongside Black/queer work on the foundational anti-Black exclusions
of the category human (Zakiyyah Iman Jackson 2020), work on queer (and trans) in/humanisms
(Muñoz et al. 2015) and racialized “tranimalities” (Hayward and Weinstein 2015) pry open the
racialized categories of sex, gender, and sexuality that produce and stabilize borders within and
between human and nonhuman.
Thinking queer as vitality, this work explores the borders and movements between life and
death, bios and necros, vitality and de-animation. Queer points to same-sex-desiring (and gender-
transgressing) subjects, intimacies, and pleasures but also scales up (to global histories of
colonialism) and down (to granular bio/social assemblages). The elsewhere of queer and trans in
these approaches enables a fresh consideration of queer injury and intimacy, death and life, and the
production of complexly queered assemblages in the long aftermaths of slavery, colonialism, and
necropolitical violence.

Queer Desires and Sexual Politics

The third arena of queer I consider takes questions of vitality more directly into the possibilities of
queer as desire or erotics—a kind of life force, especially in work that follows from Audre Lorde’s
ovaric14 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984). Jafari Allen, for instance, theorizes desire
as a form of “erotic self-making” for Black Cubans, a reading that centers “the various and often
conflicting meanings, uses, and channels of Black queer desire—desire for political empowerment or
autonomy, desire for fun and carefree play in the face of social suffering, and erotic desire for one
another, or an/other” (2013, 552; see also 2011). Twining pleasure and power, Allen explores how
“practices of desire” are also “confrontations with extrinsic power or structures” (2012, 326) and
how desires move between the sexual/sensual and the political and social.
I theorize queer as desire in my own recent work on queer left activist theorizing in North
American activist and academic networks (Hollibaugh and Weiss 2015; Weiss 2015, 2020; Weiss et al.
2012). Drawing on Amber Hollibaugh’s theorization of sexuality and desire as “a profound component
of both how people are oppressed and how people dream” (Hollibaugh and Flanders 2012) and José
Esteban Muñoz’s work on queer as “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that
indeed something is missing” (2009, 1), I explore queer both as a site of injury or vulnerability and
of future-directed potential or possibility. Like all activism, queer activism works in the gap between
what is and what could be (see Dave 2012). Yet queer’s difference entwines desires for social change
and sexual/sensual desires in what Sedgwick called fractal intricacy: “using the leverage of ‘queer’
to do a new kind of justice” (1993, 9). For activists, queer is a knowledge practice that links sexual
and political desire to erotic and economic justice, enabling new theorization of the links between
capitalism, the state, colonialism, and racism and pleasure, desire, possibility, and joy.
In Erotic Islands, Lyndon Gill (2018) takes up Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic as simultaneously
political, spiritual, and sensual to explore “eros as epistemology,” a “way of reading and a way
of being in the world” (199). Considering calypso, Carnival, and HIV/AIDS activism in Trinidad and

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Tobago, Gill renarrativizes Black/queer same-sex-desiring subjects emplaced in artistic, community-

making work, where embodiment, sensuality, aesthetics, and desire produce queer relationality.
Against readings of Caribbean homophobia or reductive, US-centered notions of sexual and
gendered identity, Gill’s analysis explores eros as “the motivation for political action, sensual
intimacy and spiritual hunger—together constitutive elements of an erotic subjecthood” that
grounds queer relationality (2012, 35).
Charting a related path, Ana-Mauríne Lara’s two new books explore Black/queer erotics and
desire in the Dominican Republic. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty takes up queer : Black as an
incommensurate and “unresolved analogy” (2020, 14), asking, “Can we consider a Black sovereignty
in which queerness is no longer an apt metaphor for corporeal-temporal difference” and “a queer
freedom not predicated on Black subjugation and unidimensional, homonormative configurations of
bodies, spaces, and times?” (17). Written in the form of a ceremony, or ofrenda, Lara’s queer poetic
form invites an imaginative, decolonizing rereading of Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity as new
forms of being and relating. Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (2021)
highlights LGBTQ activists’ political strategies of resistencia in the face of multiple forms of Christian
coloniality (including the coloniality of the concepts of sex, race, and gender). In both books, Lara
centers Lorde’s queer theorization of erotic politics. For instance, in Streetwalking, Lara writes that
“it is our erotic orientations . . . that guide us toward justice in the context of Christian colonial sexual
terror” (2021, 18). In Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty, Lara puts Lorde into dialogue with M. Jacqui
Alexander’s “erotic autonomy” to imagine queer Black decolonization as the creation of new sacred
connections between subjects, land, and multiple kinds of material and immaterial bodies (2020,
4-5). Lara’s queer is a decolonizing one, centered on her own queer desires; Queer Freedom : Black
Sovereignty opens with the line “I desire decolonization as in I desire the full realization of our lives,
as queer peoples, as Black peoples, as Indigenous peoples” (2020, 2).
Recent scholarship on sex work and pornography also explores the complex sociality of
erotic desire as it intertwines power and pleasure. For instance, Mireille Miller-Young’s (2014)
work on Black women in pornography and Heather Berg’s (2021) on pornography workers and
Marxist feminist antiwork politics draw on ethnography to foreground how sexual laborers offer
critical theorizations of gender, sexuality, racialization, objectification, exploitation, and power. (My
Techniques of Pleasure also takes this tack, challenging the stale sex wars binary by reading BDSM
practice and performance as both reproducing and eroding class, gender, and racial hierarchy [Weiss
2011a].) The array of new ethnographies of sex work and tourism similarly forefront erotics as
entwined with racialization, white supremacy, and histories of imperialism and colonial difference—
in, for instance, Gregory Mitchell’s (2015) ethnography of encounters between gay sex tourists and
mostly heterosexual sex workers in Brazil and Noelle M. Stout’s (2014) ethnography of queer Cubans,
sex workers, and tourists (see also Padilla 2007; Williams 2013). In this work, queer helps focalize
how crosscutting desires and racialized/ethnic fetishization produces and unsettles normative
intimacies.
In these readings of queer as erotics, “what we’re rolling around in bed with,” as Amber
Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga put it back in 1981, embodied intimacies can be theorized as
structural, political, economic—and vice versa. While pleasure is central to these theorizations,
they do not lack attention to power and politics, nor do they bear a simple relationship to same-
sex-desiring subjects. For instance, Don Kulick and Jens Rydström’s (2015) Loneliness and Its
Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement is a queer comparison of desire and pleasure

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among disabled people in Denmark and Sweden, asking when and how the right to an erotic life is
supported by the state. Kulick and Rydström’s comparative queer theory from elsewhere disrupts
the universalization of US categories, instead considering the limits of the “Western conception of
personhood” beyond the terms that have dominated North American disability studies (16).
For ethnographers seeking to theorize erotic power and politics, queer is a non-identitarian way
into questions of desiring subjects (often but not exclusively human), modalities of racialized gender,
and sensual/sexual/spiritual politics. Queer enables a complex grappling with sexual politics—moving
between embodied racialized subjects, globalized structures of power, and forms of sovereignty and
autonomy. Desire, here, is both a call and a foreclosure, connected to but also exceeding identity
and opening up new forms of erotic interrelations shot through with power.

Epistemologies: Queer Analytics

My fourth and final category takes up queer as a critique of the normative assumptions that
undergird disciplinary epistemologies. In line with Michael Warner’s early call for queer to critique “a
wide field of normalization,” including “normal business in the academy” (1993, xxvi), this queer is
more about forms than subjects, yet still displays a characteristic tension around im/proper objects
as it queries the place of sexuality and gender in queer methodologies, analytics, forms of writing,
and ways of knowing.
When methodology is discussed in queer studies, it is often posed as a disciplinary binary
between the textual or interpretive approaches common in the humanities (especially literary
criticism) and the empirical or positivist approaches in the social sciences (especially sociology; see
Ghaziani and Brim 2019). Cultural anthropology’s distinctive “critical empiricism,” in Boellstorff’s
term (2007b, 18)—its simultaneous attention to particularistic, emplaced speaking subjects and
to the limits of their, our, and all frames of knowing and naming—troubles this binary (see also
Love 201915 ). One might, following Danilyn Rutherford, consider this ethnography’s foundational
“kinky” (or queer) empiricism: “kinky, like a slinky, twisting back on itself, but also kinky, like S and
M and other queer elaborations of established scenarios, relationships, and things. An empiricism
that admits that one never gets to the bottom of things, yet also accepts and even celebrates the
disavowals required of us given a world that forces us to act” (2012, 465). Queer as epistemology
produces complex reckonings with form, object, and theorization.
Formally, this can take shape through experimental modes of writing. For instance, Gill’s
(2018) Erotic Islands combines sensory readings of image, sound, breath, and touch with his own
reflexive and teasing erotic “interludes,” creating a formal dialogue within the text itself (see
also Shange’s [2019a, 2019b] queer experiments with autoethnographic and multilingual Black girl
and queer/fugitive writing). Lara’s Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty (2020) is perhaps the most
innovative of texts I’ve discussed, combining ethnographic poetics and speculative archives within
the ofrenda form. But many ethnographies explore experimental forms—poetry, prose, image—which
we might see as queer in the sense of twisting anthropology’s normative generic conventions.
There is too much experimental ethnography to totalize this category, but I could name recent work
such as the Northern Australian collective Miyarrka Media’s (2019) Phone & Spear, a collection of
mobile phone–based art/text; Cassandra Hartblay’s (2020) ethnographic play I Was Never Alone,
or Oporniki, on disability relationality in Russia; Lochlain Jain’s (2019) “graphic menagerie” Things
That Art; and Jason Pine’s (2019) character-based “storybook” The Alchemy of Meth. These are
not queer in the sense of making their object same-sex desire (or sexuality/gender). And yet each,

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intriguingly, touches down on at least one of queer’s more proper objects: pleasure, non-straight
temporality, crip embodiment, affect and the senses, or problems of tidy categorization.
Queer might also speak to analytics, illuminating non- or a-queer objects of analysis that only
sometimes refer back to sexuality proper. For instance, George Paul Meiu’s (2017) Ethno-erotic
Economies: Sexuality, Money and Belonging in Kenya considers the ramifications of Samburu men’s
performance of “the African warrior” to attract European women in the sex tourism trade in coastal
Kenya. What is queer in this ethnography is less the commodified sexual exchanges or “ethno-erotic”
performances (although these are nonnormative, a la Gayle Rubin [1984] and Cathy Cohen [1997]),
and more the ways sex tourism queers other normative frames, most pressingly the straight time
of life course, age grade, and wealth accumulation. As Meiu argues, these are queer moments in an
otherwise heteronormative path, queerness in the service of men’s desires for family and marriage
(194; this harkens back to the infamous Sambia debates, another temporarily queer form that makes
way for durable heterosexual futures [see Elliston 1995, 2004]).
Similarly, Sarah Luna’s (2020) Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-
US Border explores the entanglements between Mexican sex workers, US missionaries, and drug
workers in la zona, the prostitution zone in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico. Queer emerges
as sex workers are tarnished with the “whore stigma” (18), in their homosocial and ribald jokes, in
the straight Christian missionaries’ erotic relationships to God, and in both sex and drug workers’
relation to “easy money.” Yet in my reading, the most innovative way queer emerges is unexpected,
centered in what Luna calls a “polyamorous” methodology: a method that seeks “triads” rather than
binary, monogamous couplets (13). Luna’s attention to the analytical purchase of the “love triad”
as a borderlands queer approach begins to deconstruct other dyads—of choice/agency, us/them,
anthropologist/object of study. Her queer polyamorous method, then, takes aim less at objects (or
subjects) and more at “binary” thinking as a form tied to monogamy as normative analytic—in line
with Kim TallBear’s decolonizing critique of (settler) monogamy (TallBear 2018; TallBear and Willey
2019). In this move, queer critique both is and is not attached to sexuality and gender, erotics, or
same-sex desire (and gender transgression).
Paul Boyce, EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, and Silvia Posocco explore queer as a formal relationship of
partiality or dissonance between “signifier and self” in their edited volume Queering Knowledge:
Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern (2020, 2). Drawing on Strathern’s
concepts of partial or merographic connections, productive gaps, and recontextualizations, Boyce,
Gonzalez-Polledo, and Posocco trouble “notions of bounded, organic and/or integrated social wholes
or individual subjects, as well as the assumed transparency of analytics of gender and sexuality” (15).
Some chapters take up properly queer and trans topics, such as queer kinship, trans embodiment,
gay men in Helsinki, the sexual politics of post-socialist Hungary, and HIV prevention in India. Other
chapters do not, such as the temporal figuration of Korea’s Cold War–informed bipolarity, or the
documents and archives of transnational adoption in Guatemala.
In her conclusion to the volume, Henrietta L. Moore raises the tension I have highlighted
throughout this essay, between a queer that centers same-sex-desiring subjects (and gender
transgression) and one that refuses those more proper subjects/objects. On the one hand, she writes,
queer is “a powerful critique of normative and exclusionary practices, a move against the closure
of political and social horizons,” and so it has sought “to expand its domain, working outwards from
issues of sexuality and identity politics towards broader social horizons” (2020, 182). On the other
hand, Moore argues, calls for something “beyond the limits of language, category, position”—a queer
beyond sexuality—“insistently refer back to their origins and the conditions of their own emergence

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as forms of knowledge production” (186). Moore describes queer as a departure that arrives at its
own origin: “Clearly,” she writes, “it is impossible to reform queer’s marking by sexuality since this
is constitutive of the heart of the discourse. Queer does not come after sexuality but is found within
it” (189).
In considering queer as an epistemological provocation, we encounter the crux of the matter:
a queer that seeks to be “beyond,” unfixed, and loosened from its obsessional “attachment to the
sexual subject” (Eng and Puar 2020, 16) often finds itself back where it started: in the realm of
the desiring subject. And yet, of course, that subject’s complex erotic and political attachments,
locations, and refusals have never been adequately captured by terms like gay or lesbian—or even
queer. Queer epistemologies, in this case, heighten the disjunctive gap between abstraction and
particularity, opening up paradoxes of data and theory that are (I argue, usefully) heightened but
not resolved in the ethnographic practice of situated knowledge production (Weiss 2011b, see also
Boellstorff 2010).

Conclusion: Queer Anthropology and the “Elsewhere” of Desire

Through the movements of queer I have explored in this essay—queer as a challenge to categorical
legibility, queer as a way to rethink vitalities and the bio- and necropolitics of the human,
queer and/as desire and erotic politics, and queer as a deconstruction of normative knowledge
projects—queer anthropology has made substantive contributions to an interdisciplinary project of
re/provincializing queer studies, offering multiple queer theories from elsewhere. This is not a queer
of transcultural universal sameness nor any simple notion of representational fullness that might
arise from ethnographic depiction. Instead, queer (and trans) open into new modes of legibility and
translation; forms of biopower, necropolitics, and state violence; toxic entanglements and human-
animal interfaces; and new epistemologies and approaches to genre and form. We are left, I think,
with what Gill describes as anthropology’s “imperfect but revelatory” methodology (2018, 212),
grounded both in the specificity of situated subjects and the densely intersectional ways queerness
refuses totalizing capture. As Gill writes, in “an ethnography that is not one” (2018, 14), queer names
one mode of this refusal, a refusal at the site of capture.
Yet this refusal does not displace queer’s central tension between its oppositional poles—
between objectless and subject-centered, between a queer unmoored from gender/sexuality and
one centering same-sex desire (and gender transgression). Indeed, queer takes shape as the field
activated by this polarity and its inversions, across objects, locations, and field/sites. As I’ve
discussed, it is often the embrace of one aspect that returns us to the other, and vice versa: attention
to legibly queer subjects produces a refusal of existent forms, categorization produces illegibility, life
is found in conditions of death, pleasure gives way to power, or attention to purportedly non-queer
forms returns to questions of sex or embodiment. Indeed, we might say that queer is caught by its
own formative conditions: a queer that simultaneously enjoins us to reach “beyond” the sexed body,
gendered subject, and same-sex desires and insists on the centrality of those objects (and subjects).
This is a queer that is permanently troubled by its foundational im/proper objects, always ready (and
hoping?) to be “vanquished” by its constitutive exclusions (Butler 1993, 21).
As a student of queer theory and anthropology, both, I am drawn back to Sedgwick, and her
refusal to call for a “beyond”—a new queer that could triumph over what has come before. Sedgwick
describes this move as a “bossy gesture” where the critic calls for “an imminently perfected critical
or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only adumbrate” (2003, 8). Instead, and somewhat

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surprisingly, she locates an alternative approach in one of the classics of queer anthropology: Esther
Newton’s “besides” analytic in her ovaric Mother Camp (1979).
I have in this essay attempted to elucidate the central tension at the heart of transnational queer
studies without that “bossy gesture,” to think alongside, “besides, ” not “beyond.” I have stayed
with queer’s constitutive trouble—the distinctive contradictions that generate queer studies as a
field of desire. The desire to find forms of representation calibrated more precisely to power and its
enfolding of life, the desire for decolonization and queer freedom, the desire to work toward justice
in the world and our rendering of it—these desires are never outside the violence of authorizing
knowledge formations, including (but not limited to) anthropology’s own. And so, rather than posit
a false exit from this bind, I double down on it, to take queer as our desire—not to know, fix, or
own but to think otherwise—a desire that will always be frustrated, fall short, disappoint. The field’s
contestations over proper objects, including whether it should have any at all; over the adequacy of
any term to describe the range of sexualities and genders in their intersections with racialization,
class, ethnicity, Indigeneity, nation, disability; over the question of the lens the anthropologist brings
to the field, even when that field is “home”—these are not contestations to resolve, move “beyond,”
or otherwise free oneself from. Instead, these unresolvable problematics are what queer is: at once
epistemological and ontological, arcing between the anthropologist and their object, the object and
its anthropologist, emplaced in hierarchies of legibility and recognition, and moving disjunctively
along the transnational circulations that make these encounters possible. This is the very heart of
queer and what, in my reading, enables its best conceptual work.
And so now, at the end, we are back at the beginning, asking: What is queer, now? Always seeking
a better queer, a different queer, a queerer queer—oscillating between expansive and constrained
registers—queer study will continue to “take on meanings that cannot now be anticipated by a
younger generation whose political vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments,”
as Butler wrote about my own “younger” generation in 1993 (21). For me, queer is nothing if not
a conceptual field marked by the capaciousness that emerges through the impossible refusal of
its own proper object. That we will never rest on that object (including an im/proper “objectless
critique”) is the frustration that incites our queer critique, analysis, argument—not “beyond” but
“beside,” elsewhere and otherwise.

Notes
1 My analysis of queer’s attachments and desires is indebted to Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) work on the modes and moods of
affective attachment that pervade queer studies, as well as my previous work on the ways that queer is bound to, and thus
driven to exceed, its formative objects: identity (gay and lesbian) and the critique of normativity (hetero- and homo-; Weiss
2016a). Rather than jettisoning those objects, I argue that it is the frustration of the desires we invest in our objects that
generates queer anthropology, centering that future-facing desire—our desires for queer—as the incitement to a queerer
anthropology.
2 It is beyond the purview of this essay to fully trace the relationships between queer and feminist theory and queer and
feminist anthropology, but see Weiss (2016b) for an analysis of queer anthropology’s relation to gender (and feminist
theory) and sexuality (and queer theory).
3 For other reviews of queer anthropology, see Wilson (2019), Boellstorff (2007a, b), and Weston (1993). See also Cultural
Anthropology’s two special sections on the field, which take up the form I am laying out here: a queer “queer” (Manalansan
2016) and a queer that is “not queer” (Boellstorff and Howe 2015).
4 Indeed, such frustration is built into this story of queer; a mere three years after its debut, de Lauretis penned a strong
rejection of queer, asserting that it had become “a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry” (1994, 297).
I don’t share de Lauretis’s dismissal of queer, even as I appreciate her desire to do justice to her objects of analysis. As
Wiegman argues, politically motivated fields like queer (and feminist) studies aim to do “justice with, to, and through our

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objects of studies,” even as our objects are always “incommensurate with the political desire invested in them” (2012,
42).
5 See also Kadji Amin, who argues that queer studies is "affectively haunted by the historical and political moment of the
U.S. 1990s in which it emerged" (2016, 173–174). Amin calls for an attachment genealogy to “excavate” queer studies’s
attachment to objects that chime with its originary convergence of “same-sex sexuality, political urgency, and radical
transgression,” so that it might find new objects (182). While I agree with his diagnosis, I take a more stuck approach to
queer in this essay—staying with the haunting.
6 I have put “gender transgression” in parentheses here and throughout this essay to mark the way gender and trans is
historically positioned in queer studies, including queer anthropology. On the one hand, queer’s field formation centralizes
same-sex desire, such that trans is only ever secondary. On the other hand, the separations (or conjoinings) of gender,
sex, and sexuality as cultural and historical concepts make any strict delineation between queer and trans impossible—in,
for instance, the cultural variation of the “same” of same-sex or the “nonconforming” of gender, as well as the active
political/social connections between queer and trans (in anthropology, see Valentine 2007; Edelman 2021). I’ve settled on
this awkward phrasing to represent the way queer prioritizes sex/sexuality and erotics while also sometimes drawing in
trans subjects and analytics. As Cáel M. Keegan puts it, queer theory is “the field against which trans studies finds itself
pressed in a stipulated intimacy” as necessary supplement (2020; see also Chu and Drager 2019).
7 See Hames-García (2011) for an analysis of the genealogical politics of queer, focused on how the (white) canonical origin
story of queer theory falsely positions Black and women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and postcolonial
queer/gender theory as derivative or peripheral.
8 This important and influential call has its critics and absences. For instance, the editors do not cite Cathy Cohen’s crucial
contribution to queer of color critique’s reframing of deviancy and heteronormativity (1997) or address Black feminist
theory’s critique of the false universalizations of foundational gendered categories of the human, the latter departing
from Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers’s insight into the “ungendering” of Black men and women in the Middle Passage
(Spillers 1987, 67–68). This latter intervention has inspired new Black queer and trans feminist theory by C. Riley Snorton
(2017), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020), and Marquis Bey (2022), among others.
9 Indeed, I read the contestation over AQA’s 2010 name change from Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists to
Association for Queer Anthropology—a change from “of” to “for” that also more explicitly expanded AQA’s research
purview to include trans—as reflecting this central tension.
10 As Amin has argued, this intervention defined queer as “that which flies wherever the demands of political urgency might
call it” (2016, 175), a queer that is always “on the move” toward an “elsewhere” (178). In an argument related to my
own, Amin critiques this formulation as both a front (as queer continues to reference sex, gender, and sexuality) and,
paradoxically, a disciplinary norm.
11 In line with Mikdashi and Puar’s critique of "queer theory as American Studies" and moving toward a different
understanding of the "transnational," other scholars, most prominently in African feminist and Asian queer studies,
have called for regional rereadings of queer. For instance, OyèrónkẹÓyeˇwùmí (1997) argues against universalized Euro-
American gender categories by theorizing from West African Yoruban concepts, an intervention related to newer work
in Black studies (see note 8) and African queer studies (Nyanzi 2014; Currier and Migraine-George 2016; Fiereck, Hoad,
and Mupotsa 2020). Howard Chiang and Alvin Wong propose queer Asian regionalism to center China, Singapore, and
the Sinophone world, deprovincializing queer studies beyond the "intersectional and diaspora models developed out of
US-based ethnic studies" (2016, 1645; also Wilson 2006). See also Petrus Lui (2010), who argues that queer theory’s
foundational anti-identitarian critique of the false universalization of “gay and lesbian” relies on a binary between West
and East that fixes China as a bounded cultural other deployed to shore up the West as arbiter and point of (comparative)
departure.
12 There is congruence between Shange’s call for an "abolitionist anthropology" (2019c and this issue) and my understanding
of queer: as a space of possibility that is accountable to its own failures; the way the desire for an otherwise is disciplined;
and yet the insistence of continuing to desire and work toward freedom.
13 Davis notes, “the term Two Spirit was self-selected in 1990 at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American/First Nations
Gay and Lesbian gathering in Winnipeg, Canada” to replace a colonialist term with an entirely new pan-Indigenous term
(2019, 73).
14 For use of ovaric instead of seminal, see Shange (2019c, 95).
15 Love discusses the humanities’ refusal to acknowledge its own “method” as an erasure of institutional location, which
makes possible exaggerated claims to interdisciplinarity; see also Weiss (2011b) on the situatedness of all queer theory,
including anthropology.

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M. Weiss

15. Acknowledgements
My gratitude to Dána-Ain Davis and Sameena Mulla, first for inviting me to take on this queer state of the field
essay, and then for their stalwart encouragement through its myriad deviations. Thanks also to Savannah Shange
for the co-conspiracy and conversation–and writing-in-relation. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose
feedback was a rare combination of incisive, generous, and constructive. This review essay was completed alongside
a forthcoming edited volume on Queer Anthropology; I also thank the contributors to that volume who have inspired
me to think toward a queerer anthropology.

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