Abstract
Over the last decades, queer anthropology has striven to decenter the West as the primary reference point in studies of gender, sexuality, and love in the global South – to go beyond the implications of Northern researchers’ own binary and body-based knowledges, the ‘grid of intelligibility by which we make sense of feelings, practices, bodies (Richardson 2007: 465; Foucault 1979; Oyewumi 2005). Work by anthropologists such as Tom Boellstorff, Carolyn Epple, and Thomas Hendriks (to name only a few) have sought to move research away from older ethnocartographic practices (=simply putting the world’s non-normative sexualities on a map) or being content with finding local (emic) terms that describe these non-normative sexualities. New research calls for creating theory from our data of ‘everyday experiences and (mis)understandings between the researcher and those studied’ (Hendriks 2018: 854); for understanding that there are many emics within the same locality (Epple 1998); and for seeing non-normative sexualities as not only multiple but also potentially fluid and situation-specific. Research from the global South can help us disconnect and parse out the (often assumed) analytical links between sex, sexuality and gender in our theorizing. This panel welcomes papers based on fieldwork, interviews, or archives that address any or all of these aims, from any part of the world outside Europe and North America (but including European and North American indigenous groups).
Organizer
Laura Stark (Ph.D) is Professor of Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, mobile telephony, urban poverty and early marriage in the global South. Recent scientific articles have been published in Ethnologia Europaea; Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology; Culture, Health and Sexuality; and Human Technology. She has edited the Routledge volume Gendered Power and Mobile Technology: Intersections in the Global South (2019) with Caroline Wamala Larsson, and has led four major funded research projects, including Mobile Technology, Gender and Development in Africa and India (2010–2013); and Urban Renewal and Income-Generating Spaces for Youth and Women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2013–2017).