Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This chapter situates contemporary queer anthropology within histories of the contested relationships between gender and sexuality, and feminist and queer studies. I begin with the delineation of gender as the domain of feminist studies, and sexuality as the domain of queer studies, staging a series of analogical readings of feminist and queer studies and their proper objects and political investments. I focus on two questions: the problematic of institutionalization (and the closure or fixity institutionalization represents) and the problematic of good enough objects—objects that might satisfy the political desires we have invested in them. Examining the political aspirations we invest …

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 …