Queer Ethnography

The Queer Ethnography research cluster is an attempt by queer and feminist scholars and artists from different but convergent disciplines to capture the particularities of emergent cultural forms and the sense made of them at their inception. As feminists, anthropologists, cultural studies practitioners, performance practitioners, poets, and public intellectuals, we are curious about the production and consumption of queer urban space in Austin, Texas, and the ways in which ordinary life moves through it.

We give primacy to affect and lived experience (Stewart 2007; de Certeau 1984; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Thrift 2004; Berlant 1997, 2004; Cvetkovich 2003; Butler 2003; Williams 1997). While we sometimes reach for critical categories (such as "race," "gender" and "sexuality"), in moments of distress and confusion -- what Benjamin would call "states of emergency" (1969)Ñour primary analytic tack is one of tracking ordinary epistemologies as they emerge in a dense and contradictory cultural field. Our aim, then, is to consider, alongside identity-based ways of reading culture, alternative analytic categories such as rhythm, scale, tone, and kinesthetic response (Lefebvre 2004; Massumi 2002; Feld 2005). Methodologically, we are invested in uncovering new ethnographic methods for conducting fieldwork and generating scholarship, including autoethnography and performative writing.

For more information, please contact Jaclyn Pryor.