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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons

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Social and Behavioral Sciences

Margot Weiss

Queer

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology, Margot Weiss Dec 2015

Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology, Margot Weiss

Margot Weiss

Queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—and instead signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity. But for all this, queer has never quite moved beyond identity. And queer has not quite been the site of resistance we had hoped, as the story of queer studies’ academic institutionalization might portend. Still, I am not writing a eulogy for queer. Instead, in this Retrospectives essay, I resist finding—if only to lose—a new proper object of queer anthropology and suggest, rather, that it is the frustration of …


The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss Dec 2010

The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss

Margot Weiss

This essay explores methodological dilemmas in queer anthropology by reviewing three recent queer ethnographies: Mary Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America; Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic; and Gloria Wekker's The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. The essay aims to illuminate the epistemology of queer studies more broadly by focusing on a key paradox of ethnographic method: the binary of theory and data that is simultaneously made and unmade in ethnographic research and writing. In a newly transnational queer studies, ethnography …


Gay Shame And Bdsm Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, And Sexual Politics, Margot D. Weiss Dec 2007

Gay Shame And Bdsm Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, And Sexual Politics, Margot D. Weiss

Margot Weiss

This essay contrasts two contemporary activist groups: Gay Shame San Francisco, which seeks to disrupt homonormative lesbian and gay activism by challenging policing and gentrification; and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, which disseminates a public image of BDSM, leather, and kinky practitioners as suburban minivan drivers who “look and dress like your neighbors.” Margot Weiss argues that neoliberalism’s relegation of sexuality into the realm of the private renders even kinky sexual practices like BDSM normative—kink-normative, if not homonormative—by detaching potentially disruptive sexual practices from any form of radical or progressive—public—politics.