GRIP
GRIP
GRIP is happy to announce an upcoming workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, exploring new research priorities and critiques being generated within ethnographic research on gender identity and queer sexuality in the Global South.
This workshop is convened by Svati P. Shah, University of Massachusetts Amherst and University of Bergen and Paul Boyce, University of Sussex, and gathers scholars working in queer and transgender anthropology, mainly in Southern Africa and South Asia. Participants will collectively reflect on methodological, ethical and epistemological innovations in queer and transgender anthropological work that is emerging from these regions. In so doing, the workshop addresses a lacuna that emerges at the intersections of ‘Queer and Transgender Anthropology’ and ‘World Anthropology.’
World Anthropology asks what happens when people who used to be thought of as ‘natives’ become the anthropologists, while problematizing the discipline’s relationship to geographic containment and alterity. At the same time, while there has been an efflorescence of queer and transgender research within numerous non-Western academic contexts, work that is marked as ‘Queer Anthropology’ or ‘Queer Studies’ often conflates queer and transgender research, while deploying Euro-American historical referents in the process. Bringing ‘World’ and ‘Queer’ Anthropology together, the workshop examines new forms of critique and research priorities that are being generated within ethnographic research on gender identity and queer sexuality in the Global South. The workshop does so by engaging with the history of anthropology’s itinerant interests in sexuality and gender identity, and by identifying critical priorities, including juridicism, temporality, migration, language, racialization, decolonialism, affect assemblage, and emergence, that emanate from the ‘worlds’ of queer and transgender anthropology in outside of the Euro-American West.
This workshop is generously supported by GRIP, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State, South Africa.
