A friend announces, “My sister just had a baby last night!” Many people will immediately ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Gender is central to the way peop...

Anthropologists are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as “natural” in our lives is actually cultural—it is not grounded in the natural world or in biology but invented by humans. Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places. Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be.

Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in twentieth-century anthropological studies of sex and gender, queer anthropology is also part of interdisciplinary scholarship on queer existence that defines sex and gender as key axes for the distribution of status, resources, membership, and value in a society. The aim is not to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBTQ) life in universal terms. Rather, ethnographies emphasise the different forms that queer existence takes. Queer anthropology explains the conditions that shape queer life, such as cultural understandings of sexuality, legacies of colonial regimes, or global flows of popular culture. This entry explores four foci that characterise queer anthropology: language, especially categories of identity; varying forms of transgender roles; a geographic emphasis on the United States; and the relation of local sex/gender diversity to the global expanse of Western forms of lesbian and gay identity.

Preface

A century ago, people had a very different idea of what it means to be heterosexual. Understanding that shift in thinking can tell us a lot about fluid sexual identities today.

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