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- Convenors:
-
Katherine Giunta
(University of Sydney)
Sophie Pezzutto (Australian National University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Slatyer room (N2011), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to provoke discussion on the value of queer anthropology. We invite papers which reflect on issues of gender, sexuality and beyond in queer, unorthodox or non-normative ways, with the aim of privileging otherwise marginalised voices, methods, and frameworks.
Long Abstract:
In developing new ways of approaching how we think about gender and sexuality as anthropologists this panel invites papers which engage the queer in anthropology. From destabilising heterosexual, cisgender, and Western understandings of gender and sexuality (Stryker 2006, 2013, Wekker 2006), to queering ethnographic research methodologies (Rutherford 2012), arguing for the importance of an anthropology of queers (Lewin & Leap 1996, 2002), or for a queer approach to less obviously queer subjects (Boellstorff and Dave 2015), this panel seeks to provoke discussion on the value of queer anthropology. We invite papers which reflect on issues of queerness, gender and sexuality in unorthodox, non-normative ways, privileging otherwise marginalised voices, methods, or frameworks, and/or highlighting the always already queer in anthropology.
Boellstorff, T and Dave, N. N. 2015. "Introduction: The Production and Reproduction of Queer Anthropology." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, July 21. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-the-production-and-reproduction-of-queer-anthropology
Lewin, E., & Leap, W. L. (1996). Out in the field: Reflections of lesbian and gay anthropologists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lewin, E., & Leap, W. L. (2002). Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press.
Rutherford, D. (2012). Kinky Empiricism. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 465-479.
Stryker, S., & Whittle, S. (Eds.). (2006). The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
Stryker, S., & Aizura, A. (Eds.). (2013). The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York; London: Routledge.
Wekker, G 2006, The Politics of Passion: Women's sexual culture in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora, Columbia University Press, New York
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 December, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
My fieldwork with Sydney's queer gaming communities was coloured by 'queer failure' (Halberstam 2011). I believe an understanding of queer failure, as an important part of queer life worlds and also as a paradigm in queer ethnography, could be useful in the process of evaluating queer anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork, I witnessed participants creating spaces in which specific failures were both encouraged and required. Halberstam (2011) and Juul (2013) both speak about a similar phenomenon they term 'the art of failure'. The idea has many valid criticisms: Johnson (2015) critiques the ableism implicit within Halberstam's conclusion. They claim that there needs to be a more nuanced typology of failure that includes the distress caused by failure that isn't chosen (2015). My participants were aware of engaging within a system that operated against their interests. They gamed the system whenever they could, reinvented their games and their worlds in their own image. Their failures granted them authenticity and relatability with each other. But failure also resulted in constant instability. Operating against hegemonic structures is difficult in a place like Sydney. They railed against the regulated place they claimed their home had become, even as they continually reconfigured public and private spaces where they continued to gather. Researching queer communities in one's home town is an exercise in queer failure. Even now, in the writing process, I fail to represent them as the people I currently know them as. I propose queer failure as a different way to be self-reflexive in anthropology. Evaluating something, at the most basic level, is commonly seen as weighing up its successes and failures. In this paper I'd like to trouble that dichotomy, draw on stories from my fieldwork in Sydney's Queer Gaming Communities, and in turn, value failure in queer anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an exploration of my relationship with one of my main informants, a well-known transgender porn star in Las Vegas, whose hyper-awareness to the commodification of various aspects of her life made me seriously reflect on the nature, purpose, and ethics of ethnographic practice.
Paper long abstract:
What can porn teach ethnographers about the ethics of ethnographic practice?
Due to stigma and fame, many porn performers do not have friendships outside the sex industry. In addition to spending free time together and celebrating each other's birthdays, friends are always also colleagues with whom performers shoot pornos, network at awards shows, and compare their careers.
As an ethnographer, similarly, most of my friendships in the field have been working relationships as good friends become key informants, informing my thesis. In an industry where the personal is almost always also the professional, many of my informants were acutely aware of the commodified aspects of my friendship with them. This paper is an exploration of my relationship with one of my main informants, a well-known transgender porn star in Las Vegas, whose hyper-awareness to the commodification of various aspects of her life, clashed with my ethnographic mission to discover who she was behind her fame, ultimately culminating in a fight which made me seriously reflect on the nature, purpose, and ethics of ethnographic practice.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I consider both the values underpinning the stigma associated with HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and how this is experienced by PrEP users. Additionally, I discuss the ways in which this stigma has been challenged by PrEP users and advocates.
Paper long abstract:
HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is the use of antiretroviral therapy by HIV negative persons to prevent HIV infection. Large-scale, randomised contral trials have shown PrEP to be an effective HIV prevention strategy, whether condoms are used during sex or not. PrEP uptake by men who have sex with men (MSM) has been accompanied by a concern that PrEP might negatively impact the use of condoms, an object that has been imbued with significant social, cultural, and moral capital from the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. At one extreme, PrEP users have been portrayed as promiscuous, having a reckless disregard for their own health and that of others, as well as being either unable or unwilling to use condoms. These portrayals have been widely interpreted by many PrEP users as inherently stigmatising. At the same time, however, PrEP has been portrayed by some PrEP advocates and users as a superior form of HIV prevention than condoms. Alongside PrEP-related stigma, then, a stigmatisation of those who only use condoms to prevent HIV has also emerged. This paper draws on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in 2018 among MSM communities in Melbourne, Australia, as well as observations of the social media pages of two Australian-based PrEP advocacy groups. In this paper, I consider both the values underpinning PrEP-related stigma and how this stigma is experienced. I demonstrate that even as PrEP users have been stigmatised as high risk individuals, PrEP users have challenged this through discourses of PrEP's superiority as a harm-reduction strategy.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss the specific ways that queer femmes in Sydney, Australia continually re-make non-heteronormative femininities as a moral/ethical practice within their local queer value regimes. In doing so I argue for the value of a queer anthropology that places queer lives at its center.
Paper long abstract:
To ask questions about femininities, queerness, and queer femininities is to consider questions of value, ethics and morality. Certain forms of femininities have been valued and devalued as more or less transgressive, queer or feminist within differently situated social and academic value regimes. The moral dimensions of femininities constantly shift across different temporal, sexual, gendered, classed and racialised contexts, and remain a central feature of queer and feminist lives, activisms and analyses. In this paper, I discuss the specific ways that queer femmes in Sydney, Australia continually re-make non-heteronormative femininities as an everyday moral and ethical practice. Drawing on Foucauldian and phenomenological approaches in the anthropology of moralities, I take moral experiences to be the mundane, profoundly relational moments in which Sydney femmes do the ethical work of reflexively enacting what they understand as 'good' femininities. Based on 12 months of participant observation ethnography with self-identified femmes in Sydney's queer communities, I consider femmes' ethical work in light of the community-specific hierarchies of value that their lives shape and are shaped by. In doing so, I argue that ongoing processes of ethical problematisation are a fundamental feature of Sydney femmes' enactments of femininities. It follows that I understand Sydney femmes as engaged in queer world building projects. I consider my turn to the moral dimensions of femininities to be a queer one, enabling me to attend to the desirous, imaginative and inventive possibilities of being feminine.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an auto-ethnographic narrative exploration of questions that emerged out of my experience teaching undergraduate classes in the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality. It explores a series of invaluable encounters in pedagogy that raise key questions about anthropological value(s).
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the politics of representation and the construction of knowledge about gender and sexuality in an undergraduate classroom in which students don't just listen, but seek to find the basis upon which they can not only speak about their own lives, but speak up and against systems of violence that operate both globally and on their own campuses. Through a series of stories that highlight questions of voice; of representation; of safety and danger; of the possibilities for speaking and of listening; of the lure and danger of difference; I explore the limits of pedagogy in spaces where commitments to reflexivity, solidarity and de-colonisation meet an earnest desire for better, safer lives. In sharing these stories, I chart the way students assign value to certain forms of knowledge and the way 'we' as instructors present values to our students. Additionally, I will consider the way 'we' value students, and how queering these values might force us to think differently about Anthropological values. In particular, I seek to raise questions about the kinds of pedagogical commitments we could/should make to students marginalised by structures of gender and sexuality.