Introduction: anthropology©s queer sensibilities Article (Accepted Version) Boyce, Paul, Engebretsen, Elisabeth L and Possoco, Silvia (2018) Introduction: anthropology's queer sensibilities. Sexualities, 21 (5-6). pp. 843-852. ISSN 1363-4607 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/70747/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. 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Engebretsen University of Oslo, Norway Silvia Posocco Birkbeck, University of London, UK Abstract This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologise queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologising queer theory in research on same-sex desire in the Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection. Keywords: anthropology, gender and sexuality, queer studies, queer sensibility, difference This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. As queer studies have increasingly come to influence inter/disciplinary theory production, in the fields of gender, feminist and sexuality studies, so too have issues regarding the production and dissemination of knowledge, academic (inter)disciplinarity, the use and abuse of methods and methodology, as well as the politics of knowledge production tout court become hotly debated. A key problematic in the sub-field of queer anthropology, institutionalized by now in the US, and a fractured special interest network at dispersed locations elsewhere, is to do with these connections – and inevitable ruptures. These (dis-)connections evoke tensions between empiricism and theory, concept and reality, activist and academic sensibilities. These tensions are productive and necessary, albeit oftentimes they do create feelings of discomfort or, indeed, negative vibes, or even disdain and anger: in class rooms, in conference venues, or indeed on the pages of journals and books. Importantly, these tensions and the chains of reactions they invoke, illustrate the principal topic of this issue, namely what we have called anthropology’s queer sensibilities. A sensibility is often understood in connection with emotions, as responsiveness to others’ feelings, an insight, awareness or judgment. Sensibilities are connected, further, to values and ethics, to moral landscapes of beliefs, politics, and actions; in other words they are real, particular and practical and dynamically intertwined with the theoretical, ethical and general. This is why the disciplinary location of anthropology, however defined, constitutes the ontological and epistemological framings of this special issue. Joined by the adjective ‘queer’ – also known as: puzzling, unbalanced, extraordinary, kinky, strange, suspicious (from Thesaraus.com) – to form a queer sensibility, the composite notion of anthropology’s queer sensibilities aims to provoke experimental thinking and alternate approaches in ethnography-informed investigations of gender and sexual difference in the contemporary world. Anthropology as a discipline and ethnography as its principal methodology, are acutely well positioned in this respect, as it is so centrally concerned with describing lived everyday lives, in ways that are – or at least can be – particularly attuned to life worlds shaped by marginality and otherness. Anthropology and ethnography therefore can render – or indeed actively participate in producing and ‘worlding’ – the multiple transitivities and relationalities that nestle under the term ‘queer’ (see Sedgwick 1994) in forms of engaged critique. Sensibility was also the term given to a European eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophical and literary movement. The movement placed a high emphasis on emotional response and perceptiveness as a route to knowledge, acting as a precursor to Romanticism. In its emphasis of the affective dimensions of knowing we see a resonance between sensibility and ethnographic method – each emphasizing the value of knowledge based on experience over and above externalized categories and logic. Yet the Sensibility Movement also became subject to critique, for valuing an excessive display of emotion over and above more substantial qualities (Austen 1992 [1811]). In these terms sensibility itself came to be seen as a queer thing, associated with unnecessary and misjudged displays of sentiment. We see a resonance with the present project here also. This is especially so in the way that queer anthropological work is still regarded as suspect in much of the European academy, as demonstrated by its virtual absence in departments of anthropology, for example. We wonder, in part, whether this absence might be understood as a ‘sensibility effect,’ where queer anthropology, and queer anthropologists, are regarded as too closely aligned. Anthropologists working through queer epistemologies are most often doing so from deeply personal standpoints and life trajectories. While the reflexive dimensions of anthropological work may be encouraged, close connectivity between being clearly queerly identified both as subject and ethnographer has historically acted as a profound inhibitor to career prospects and success, a circumstance that is still especially pronounced in many global contexts. Might this be because a queer anthropological sensibility is regarded as an excessive one, sidestepping customary scholarly logic, and challenging the underlying colonialist and ethnocentric legacy regarding definitions of self and others, in the field but certainly also in the departmental home? In these terms, might a queer anthropological sensibility be associated with an affective resonance that continues to locate queer anthropologists and their work – as undisciplined Others, perhaps - and as epistemologically and thematically suspect or illegitimate? To date, much if not most of such debate, and its related research and publications, have come out of US academia, where queer anthropology and gay and lesbian anthropology before that, have been institutionalized for some time (Boellstorff 2007; Morris 1995; Weston 1993). Notable US-based queer anthropologists Tom Boellstorff and Naisargi Dave write in a recent special section titled 'Queer futures' in Cultural Anthropology, that queer projects today might easily take the shape of topics and problems not evidently "queer", meaning projects that might be less focused on gender and sexuality from a perspective informed primarily by identity politics or identitarian concepts of self and being (Boellstorff and Dave 2015). This might well be true, and certainly it is an important development of queer anthropology that queer projects are extending beyond theoretical and methodological concerns that first shaped the field of study. Yet in many global contexts the moment of ‘queer anthropological arrival and transcendence’ evoked by an epistemological move beyond obviously queer objects of study has a more limited resonance. In many contexts queer anthropological work (on or about seemingly clearly queer subjects/objects or otherwise) has had little purchase, or has afforded limited opportunity or expression