Queer Theory from Elsewhere and the Im/Proper Objects of Queer Anthropology

Abstract

What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, I explore queer as a political-intellectual orientation and aspirational field animated by its constitutive polarity: between a more constrained queer focused on sex, sexuality, and gender and a more expansive queer that bears an oblique relationship to these more proper objects. I trace how the desire to do justice to our objects of study produces queer’s characteristic inversions, so that when we seek to move “beyond” queer’s proper objects, we find ourselves drawn back into them and inversely, when we seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves elsewhere and otherwise. I illuminate this queer movement through a conceptual review of recent scholarship in queer anthropology (loosely 2015-21), drawing out queer as (1) a challenge to categorical legibility, (2) a way to rethink vitalities between bio- and necropolitics, (3) a field of political, social, and sensual erotics and desires, and (4) a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects and epistemologies. Throughout, I reflect on anthropology's place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.