Lesbian and Gay Anthropology

Lesbian and Gay Anthropology

The late 1960s saw the increasing radicalization of many areas of the civil rights movement in the United States, including the movement for lesbian and gay rights. Gay liberation's repudiation of psychology as the ultimate arbiter of the social status of its political constituency coincided with a revival of studies of homosexuality in other social science disciplines.The increasing importance of feminist studies in anthropology was already demonstrating that the analysis of gender and sex roles was key to an understanding of social structures such as kinship and economic exchange. Gay and lesbian politics provided an additional impetus for this kind of study.Anthropology as a discipline, too, was changing and radicalizing.The Vietnam War had made American anthropologists aware of their colleagues' complicity in the war effort by providing intelligence to the United States government; this in turn prompted a critical reflection on anthropology's tacit support of past colonial and genocidal regimes.Anthropologists also began to challenge hitherto unquestioned assumptions about their field methods, including the social identity of the anthropologist while in the field, as well the taboo topic of sexual relations with one's informants.It was during this self-critical but expansive period in the discipline's history that a lesbian and gay anthropology--typically the study of apparently homosexual people that did not seek to reduce their behavior to a question of social pathology, conducted by anthropologists who were usually themselves lesbian or gay--began to take shape.

The Anthropology Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH), a professional organization, was formed in the early 1970s and had its first official meeting in 1978. The 1972 publication of Esther Newton's Mother Camp, a study of professional drag queens in Chicago and Kansas City based on research conducted in the mid-1960s, marked the first book-length study of gay people by an anthropologist and spurred much additional work in the area by the end of the decade.During the 1980s and 1990s, anthropological research on homosexuality tended to cluster around a handful of topics. Primary among these, in defiance of the New Right's emphasis on "family values" and continual attempts to deny civil rights to lesbian and gay people, were studies that focused on lesbian and gay family life in the United States. These included studies of "chosen families" of friends, lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies, and children of lesbian and gay parents. Great Books Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists by Ellen Lewin Margaret Mead Made Me Gay Personal Essays