This book, as well as The Ethnographic I by Carolyn Ellis, really made me realize how traditional/out-dated a good part of my anthropology education was. This book was published in 2002, and I got my anthro degree in 2016, and we certainly never talked about any of these trends except for a couple chapters on feminist anthropology in my “history of anthropological theory” class. I didn’t even know that “homegrown anthropology” (doing research on communities in the U.S. rather than “foreign/exotic” communities) was already a well established trend. I thought it was just getting started. Many chapters in this book were interesting to me on that level, yet not particularly useful for where I’m currently at w/r/t research and my relationship with anthropology.
Quotes I Marked
p.123- “Must the solution, then, to our marital woes [between gay male anthropology and lesbian anthropology] be a kind of intellectual bisexuality or perhaps cross-dressing? To put ourselves into each other’s worlds, if not each other’s heads, must we be willing to experiment with sexual identity, to undermine definitions we have long believed in, and perhaps to submit ourselves to the uncertainties of crossing gender boundaries?” Context is, gay male anthropology looks at “men who have sex with men” as a behavior, whereas lesbian anthropology looks at sexuality primarily as a political identity
p.195- safe sex education as particularly anthropologically vital during the AIDS crisis (as opposed to celibacy propaganda) because “lots of sex without shame or monogamy” was a big part of the ethos of gay liberation so people definitely would not have wanted to give that up.
p.206- linking barebacking fantasies with vampire fantasies (Garber!!)
p.229- people Valentine considered to be trans men were called lesbians by their own community, and people he considered to be trans women were called gay by their own community. What do you do when people definitely meet the criteria for a group (like trans) but don’t use those words themselves? This is at the Legends Ball, mostly African American and Latinx, House of Xtravaganza was there
p.230- references to “the transgender spectrum” (on materials from the Gender Identity Project founded at the Center), included “drag, cross dresser, cross-gender, femme queen, bigender, transvestite, transsexual, FTM, MTF, NewWoman, NewMan, and …. “ as potential categories
p.233- quote from Jayne County, a trans woman here writing about Atlanta in the 1960s: “There were certain divisions in the gay world even then, but we didn’t have the words for them. Everyone was just gay as far as we were concerned; that was the word we used…It didn’t matter whether you were a very straight gay man, or a screaming street queen, or a full-time drag queen, or a transsexual who wanted to have a sex change: you were gay” - here, straight gay man means a man who is gay but is normatively masculine
p.235-238- more on butch queens, femme queens, and being “gay”- it’s not contradictory or confusing if “gay” means any deviation from sexual and/or gender norms
Sources to Look Up
p.117- Weston (1991- Families We Choose, 1993, 1998), Kennedy (1993), Newton (1979, 1993), Lewin (1993)- all lesbian-feminist anthropologists whose feminism influenced their gay anthropology
p.122- Suzanna Walters (1996) writing about how the “queer sensibility” entails a “denigration of feminism”
p.131- some gay language studies- Murray (1979), Tannen (1984), Read (1980) and Goodwin (1989)