Conversation

Unsettling Queer Anthropology

Fri, Apr 4, 2025

4:15 PM–6:15 PM

Room C415A, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Register to attend.

Unsettling Queer Anthropology is the first volume to critically access both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Editor Margot Weiss along with contributor Jafari S. Allen will discuss the book and what decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches offer to anthropology today. Free and open to all, RSVP to attend.

About the Participants:

Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan, where she coordinates Queer Studies. Former president of the Association for Queer Anthropology, her books include the award-winning Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke, 2011), Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures (Feminist Press, 2023), and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke, 2024). She is currently writing a book about the politics of institutional knowledge production and the place of desire in queer/left activism.

Jafari Sinclaire Allen is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Columbia University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and Editor-in-Chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture. He edited the “Black/Queer/Diaspora” special issue of GLQ, and his books include the award-winning There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life (Duke, 2022) and ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke, 2011).

This event is co-sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. Program, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Anthropology department, the Psychology department, the Center for Humanities, and CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.