Who’s Queer? What’s Queer? Queer Anthropology through the Lens of Ethnography

摘要

I would like to use this space to explore the utility of queer nomenclature for understanding the lives of many real-world people with nonheteronormative sexual or gender identities and presentations, asking whether a field of inquiry many choose to label as “queer anthropology” can adequately represent the full diversity of the populations we study. I respond here to what I read as the prescriptive elements of “queer” as a sensibility and particularly as a discourse of resistance, and I challenge them with a call to return to our roots as ethnographers, that is, to report on and respect people as we find them in various locations. For the most part, anthropologists have done quite well at avoiding the use of classifications from Western culture, such as “gay” or “lesbian,” to label nonhetero normative sexualities/genders outside the West. Instead, we have paid close attention to the way the so-called natives understand and label themselves, thereby questioning efforts to amalgamate same-sex sexualities outside the West into the Western category of “homosexuality” (Elliston 1995).