Roundtable - Invited Status Awarded

Reviewed by: Association for Queer Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Resistance

Secondary Theme: Identity and Equity

(5-0530) Unruly Desires: Latinx/Latin American Queer Ethnographies

In past decades Latinx/Latin American queer anthropology has expanded to produce a recognizable body of scholarship that has come to understand gender, race and sexuality as critical to our comprehension of diverse communities and societies. While early ethnographies often delved into the topic of subject formation and their corresponding sexual systems, a diversification of queer ethnographies in the region has occurred. These have developed literatures on queer lives and health, migration, sex tourism, the politics of race, representations of modernity and global economic changes and their impact, among others. Some of the salient recent changes in the region concern sexual citizenship including same-sex marriage and gender identity laws, as governments in power have moved between the right and the left. While disciplines such as political science, have inquired on forms of organizing to reach these changes, ethnographic work on the process and effects of these sexual citizenship transformations has been scarce. As same-sex sexuality and other non-normative genders and sexualities are increasingly being institutionalized across the Americas, which forms of desires are marked as unruly today? How do individuals, organizations and movements negotiate self-making, subjectivities and practices in this new regional horizon? How have our conceptualization on gender, race and desire, been transformed in ethnographic writing? And what are some of the most productive intersections, interventions or problems raised in new theorizations of queer lives in the region? How do these changes interact with earlier conversations on migration and sex tourism? The goal of the roundtable is to explore distinct models of analysis to assess the various transformations that are taking place in queer Latinx/ Latin American lives across the Americas in a context of further institutionalization of non-normative gender and sexualities, and how that impacts activism, theorization, and queer ethnographic writing.

Presenter(s)

• Lorena Muñoz

  University of Minnesota

Organizer(s)

• Anahi Russo Garrido

  Assistant Professor
  Metropolitan State University of Denver

Chair(s)

• Anahi Russo Garrido

  Assistant Professor
  Metropolitan State University of Denver

Presenter(s)

• Anahi Russo Garrido

  Assistant Professor
  Metropolitan State University of Denver