Queering the Field, Or How Margaret Mead Made Me Gay

Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is the intellectual autobiography of social anthropologist Esther Newton, a pioneer in gay and lesbian studies. Chronicling the development of her ideas from the excitement of early feminism in the 1960s to friendly critiques of queer theory in the 1990s, this collection covers a range of topics such as why we need more precise sexual vocabularies, why there have been fewer women doing drag than men, and how academia can make itself more hospitable to queers. The book won the Ruth Benedict Award of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists from the American Anthropological Association.

The chapter discussed during the reading group, “My Best Informant’s Dress : The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork”, interrogates how sexuality, gender and desire play out in the field, oftentimes unreflexively so. Newton questions and unsettles the taboos of anthropological research and the privileges some hold when conducting fieldwork. Turning towards the question of how - and perhaps most importantly, why - sexuality and emotions remain persistently hidden in the discipline, Newton illuminates some of the underlying assumptions that cultivate such obliqueness and that may be challenged to be epistemologically productive.

The event will be held at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS 5028) on February 28th, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.