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Margot Weiss

Wesleyan University, American Studies and Anthropology, Faculty Member

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Margot Weiss is a cultural anthropologist whose scholarship brings together queer theory and anthropology to understand the contradictory relationships between queer sexual cultures/politics and contemporary US capitalism. Her books include Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the Ruth Benedict Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies; Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020 (The Feminist Press, 2023); and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke University Press, 2024). She has published over 20 articles and essays in a range of anthropology, queer studies, and American studies journals, including GLQ, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, New Labor Forum, Sexualities, American Anthropologist, and Feminist Anthropology. Currently, she is writing a book about the politics of institutional knowledge production and the place of desire in queer/left activism. Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, she directs the cluster in Queer Studies and is affiliated with the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. For more visit www.margotweiss.com
Address: margotweiss.com

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Books by Margot Weiss

Introduction to Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropologic... more This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life.

Introduction to Queer Then and Now: "Queer Ideas, Messy Archives, and the Then and Now of Queer Studies"

Queer Then and Now, 2023

QUEER THEN AND NOW is an essential anthology of leading academics, activists, and artists on the ... more QUEER THEN AND NOW is an essential anthology of leading academics, activists, and artists on the state of queer studies today.

Queer Then and Now collects the lectures given from 2002 to 2020 by some of the most influential scholars, artists, and activists of the last two decades—Adrienne Rich, Amber Hollibaugh, Cathy J. Cohen, Cheryl Clarke, Dean Spade, Douglas Crimp, Gayle Rubin, Isaac Julien, Jasbir K. Puar, Jonathan Ned Katz, Martin Duberman, Richard Fung, Roderick A. Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, Sarah Schulman, Susan Stryker, and Urvashi Vaid—alongside new reflections and two scholarly roundtables.

Diverse and dynamic, these lectures and intertextual conversations tackle some of today’s most important interventions from the margins—including the growth of trans studies, the synergy and disconnect between theory and activism, the role of LGBTQ+ art and media, and the challenge of transnational and postcolonial theory. Charting the intellectual development of queer studies after the 1990s, Queer Then and Now lays the groundwork for queer thinking in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Chapter 5, "SEX PLAY AND SOCIAL POWER"

Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, 2011

The final chapter, ‘‘Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective Circuit,’’ sets my performa... more The final chapter, ‘‘Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective Circuit,’’ sets my performative materialist method into motion with a series of close readings of the political effects of particular SM scenes. Focusing on cultural trauma play—specifically, play around race and ethnicity—I provide an ethnographic reading of slave auctions, Nazi play, an interracial mugging scene, and the ‘‘sadomasochistic’’ Abu Ghraib photographs. Although practitioners, like other Americans, are inclined to disavow the linkage between play with race and real racial inequality, I argue that these cultural performances are both based on and productive of material social relations. I foreground the performative efficacy of a scene, showing how and why a scene might work. This effectiveness, however, is politically multivalent; such scenes produce differential, variable, and uneven affective responses that link individuals with social and national imaginaries. These circuits between the social and the individual create opportunities for practitioners to both reaffirm and disrupt the fantasized break between the erotic and the political. Political effectiveness, then, is about whether practitioners connect their individuated, privatized erotic attachments to national histories of racialized belonging, and what happens when they do. Techniques of Pleasure ends not with a single, final analysis of the social politics of BDSM, but rather with an invitation, an opening—to explore, to linger on, the productive effects of sexual circuits.

"Introduction" to Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality

Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, 2011

Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM (SM) c... more Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM (SM) community. Margot Weiss conducted ethnographic research at dungeon play parties and at workshops on bondage, role play, and flogging, and she interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners. She describes a scene devoted to a form of erotic play organized around technique, rules and regulations, consumerism, and self-mastery. Challenging the notion that SM is inherently transgressive, Weiss links the development of commodity-oriented sexual communities and the expanding market for sex toys to the eroticization of gendered, racialized, and national inequalities. She analyzes the politics of BDSM’s spectacular performances, including those that dramatize heterosexual male dominance, slave auctions, and US imperialism, and contends that the SM scene is not a “safe space” separate from real-world inequality. It depends, like all sexual desire, on social hierarchies. Based on this analysis, Weiss theorizes late-capitalist sexuality as a circuit—one connecting the promise of new emancipatory pleasures to the reproduction of raced and gendered social norms.

Papers by Margot Weiss

"Living Together"

Current Anthropology, 2023

Invited Commentary on "Viral Entanglements: Biosecurity, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in South Korea"

Queer Theories from Somewhere: Situated Knowledges and Other Queer Empiricisms

Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures, 2024

Does Queer Theory + Ethnography = Queer Anthropology? This chapter reframes the canonical origin ... more Does Queer Theory + Ethnography = Queer Anthropology? This chapter reframes the canonical origin story of queer anthropology by disrupting the hierarchical binary of queer theory (from the humanities, and purportedly universal, unsituated, portable) and ethnographic data (from the social sciences, and particular, emplaced, a-theoretical) to show not only that queer theory depends on prior queer anthropology, but also that queer theory’s disavowal of empiricism has effaced both its own historical situatedness and its accountability to its subjects and sources. Aiming to dislodge the universalist aspirations that produce queer theory’s canonical white-and American-ness, I read a genealogy of situated, queerly empirical theory back in to queer theory.

Queer Theory from Elsewhere and the Im/Proper Objects of Queer Anthropology

Feminist Anthropology, 2022

What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, I explore queer as a po... more What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, I explore queer as a political-intellectual orientation and aspirational field animated by its constitutive polarity: between a more constrained queer focused on sex, sexuality, and gender and a more expansive queer that bears an oblique relationship to these more proper objects. I trace how the desire to do justice to our objects of study produces queer's characteristic inversions, so that when we seek to move "beyond" queer's proper objects, we find ourselves drawn back into them and inversely, when we seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves elsewhere and otherwise. I illuminate this queer movement through a conceptual review of recent scholarship in queer anthropology (loosely 2015-21), drawing out queer as (1) a challenge to categorical legibility, (2) a way to rethink vitalities between bio-and necropolitics, (3) a field of political, social, and sensual erotics and desires, and (4) a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects and epistemologies. Throughout, I reflect on anthropology's place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.

AnthroBites: What is Queer Anthropology?" Jara M Carrington interviews Margot Weiss. AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast

QUEER EVER AFTER?

Public Books, 2022

The Interlocutor Slot: Citing, Crediting, Cotheorizing, and the Problem of Ethnographic Expertise

American Anthropologist, 2021

In this reflexive commentary, I consider the forms of writing that we (anthropologists) use to di... more In this reflexive commentary, I consider the forms of writing that we (anthropologists) use to differentiate expert knowledge or theory from "data". I'm interesting in linking the politics of (interlocutor) acknowledgment to the politics of anthropological citation, and how we might refuse to reproduce extractive disciplinary models of knowledge production.

Bondage and Barbeques

Interview in Method Magazine.

Thinking kink: Reflections on the cultural study of BDSM

Sexualities, 2021

Personal reflection on the histories of cultural analysis of BDSM and BDSM theory.

Intimate Encounters: Queer Entanglements in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Anthropological Quarterly, 2020

This article explores ethnographic intimacy beyond an identitarian focus on sex, sexual identity,... more This article explores ethnographic intimacy beyond an identitarian focus on sex, sexual identity, and sex-desire by reflecting on three of my own fieldwork projects in queer anthropology. Bringing queer, decolonizing, postcolonial, and critical race theory into conversation with reflexive work on sex in/and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that broadening our conceptions of intimacy enables us to think less about sex in the field and more about sex as a field—a field of encounters, relationalities, and entanglements that connects us queerly to others. I suggest that such approaches to ethnographic knowledge might disrupt anthropology's colonial object relations by embracing a critical intimacy of interrelationality—staying with, rather than foreclosing, reifying, or trying to master, the overwhelming aspects of both sex and ethnography.

Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (1970s-2010s)

Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2018

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essa... more Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.

Introduction: Left Intellectuals and the Neoliberal University

by Margot Weiss and Naomi Greyser

T his American Quarterly forum builds on a symposium held in 2011 at Wesleyan University on the r... more T his American Quarterly forum builds on a symposium held in 2011 at Wesleyan University on the relationship between academia and activism. Our symposium was inspired by a pair of concerns: that academics too often either romanticize activism as the site where "real" political work happens or else ascribe an abstracted radical politics to quotidian academic work. These concerns emerge especially within interdisciplinary fields-fields like American studies, women's and gender studies, queer studies, and critical race and ethnic studies-that are grounded in social movements and becoming institutionalized in an increasingly corporatized university.

Collaboration: Integration

Cultural Anthropology website, 2016

In this essay, part of a collection on "collaboration," I explore complicity as a way to think ab... more

Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology, 2016

Queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—... more Queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—and instead signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity. But for all this, queer has never quite moved beyond identity. And queer has not quite been the site of resistance we had hoped, as the story of queer studies’ academic institutionalization might portend. Still, I am not writing a eulogy for queer. Instead, in this Retrospectives essay, I resist finding—if only to lose—a new proper object of queer anthropology and suggest, rather, that it is the frustration of the desires we invest in our objects that makes for a queer anthropology—and that makes anthropology queer. I also refuse to offer a next/new/now queer anthropology—our future, our new vanguard. Instead I return to a past that, I suggest, we are not after, in the sense of over, in order to flesh out what it is we are after, in the sense of desiring. I locate these dynamics first in queer anthropology’s move away from identity, then in its turn from antinormativity, and finally in the future-facing queer of speculation or possibility (what I call desire) that marks much recent work. But while I proceed linearly, I do not want to provide a progressive timeline, where we reject identity for antinormativity, antinormativity for desire, and so on, each new turn moving us out of intellectual naïveté toward a new and better queer. Instead, I argue that these three concepts—identity, normativity, and desire—are constitutive tensions in the past, present, and future of queer anthropology. They are our stumbling blocks and our goads, the limits that beg to be transgressed; they are, in the end, incitements to a queerer anthropology, an anthropology that keeps us queer.

Discipline and Desire: Feminist Politics, Queer Studies, and New Queer Anthropology

Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the 21st Century (Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein, eds.), 2016

This chapter situates contemporary queer anthropology within histories of the contested relations... more This chapter situates contemporary queer anthropology within histories of the contested relationships between gender and sexuality, and feminist and queer studies. I begin with the delineation of gender as the domain of feminist studies, and sexuality as the domain of queer studies, staging a series of analogical readings of feminist and queer studies and their proper objects and political investments. I focus on two questions: the problematic of institutionalization (and the closure or fixity institutionalization represents) and the problematic of good enough objects—objects that might satisfy the political desires we have invested in them. Examining the political aspirations we invest in our disciplines, I explore how the desire to exceed the limits of institutionalization has sparked a critical queer studies that is attentive to both particularity and to a larger global context. Detouring through some of the new work in queer studies that, in my analysis, is compatible with cultural anthropology, I focus on the places where queer analytics aim to surpass proper objects and pat political interpretations. I conclude with a survey of what I term the “new queer anthropology,” which seeks to remake its objects and analytics by pushing its key terms—queer and anthropology—into uncharted territories.

Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence

New Labor Forum, 2015

This essay begins to explore and articulate the concept of queer precarity. Queer precarity empha... more This essay begins to explore and articulate the concept of queer precarity. Queer precarity emphasizes the particular vulnerabilities of LGBT, queer, and GNC (gender non-conforming) people to the current economic transformations. Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, research from at least the mid-1990s shows that queer and gender non-conforming people are more vulnerable to poverty than their straight and cisgendered male or female counterparts. Yet this myth is sustained by the mainstream LGBT movement and too often shared by the progressive and activist labor movement. It is a particularly destructive myth for labor organizers because LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in many of these low-wage sectors. The concept of queer precarity centers LGBT/Q lives, as our multiple genders, sexualities, and orientations intersect with the lived realities of class and race. This essay seeks to develop a new political vision that centers sexuality, gender and desire in our movements for social and economic justice.

Queer Economic Justice: Desire, Critique, and the Practice of Knowledge

Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (Nikit Dhawan, Antke Engel, Christoph Holzhey, and Volker Woltersdorff, eds), 2015

This essay explores the political dreams we invest in radical sexualities and why we might want t... more This essay explores the political dreams we invest in radical sexualities and why we might want to find liberation, specifically economic justice, in radical sexualities. In a time of ongoing neoliberalization of knowledge, where what might appear to be radical sexual difference is all too easily absorbed into multicultural tolerance, I argue that the desire for sex to be liberatory indexes a more social desire for transformation. Taking up the recent turn away from critique in both queer studies and anthropology, I argue that we need critique now more than ever—an immanent critique that implicates both objects and subjects in our shared desire for collective justice.