Abstract

Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.

Paolo Heywood is an Affiliated Lecturer and Research Associate at the Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.

“Genuinely remarkable… There’s almost nothing quite this lucidly philosophical, conceptually and politically provocative, and deeply ethnographic in recent work… An intellectual treat with few competitors.” · Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University