Erin L Durban | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (original) (raw)

Papers by Erin L Durban

Duke University Press eBooks, Apr 19, 2024

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

"My goal here is to make a queer argument for cripping ethnography. I do this by engaging crip th... more "My goal here is to make a queer argument for cripping ethnography.
I do this by engaging crip theory and arguing that we must shift how we
conceive of anthropological methods: away from the white, colonial model
of fieldwork that maintains ableist anthropology and toward accessible
methods that open up spaces for disabled anthropologists. Given our training and—for so many of us—bodyminds with the inclinations, skills, and
other capacities it takes to excel in an ableist academy, the simplest (and
normative) path toward building a queer, crip anthropology would be for
queer anthropological scholarship to more fully engage crip theory, cds,
and crip of color critique. Engaging the theory generated by crip activists is
important. But it is only the beginning—and is not the more radical epistemological transformation of cripping ethnography. The challenge I take up here on the way to cripping ethnography is to dismantle and reconstruct the methodologies of our work—where ableism reproduces itself."

American Anthropologist, 2021

This article continues the tradition of writing about embodied knowledge production to highlight ... more This article continues the tradition of writing about embodied knowledge production to highlight the underanalyzed issue of ableism, providing an opening for a disciplinary reckoning with oppressive legacies towards creating collective access in anthropology and academia. Building on the creative and collaborative labor of disabled and allied anthropologists, I argue that ableism is inherent to anthropology’s disciplinary formations—especially ex- pectations pertaining to fieldwork. I make a series of claims related to this argument: The continuation of fieldwork practices from the colonial model naturalizes able bodyminds, and without intervention, reproduces ableist anthro- pology. The normate anthropologist has always had a “nondisabled” bodymind, but once disability became a proper object for anthropology, a line was solidified between “anthropologist” and “the disabled,” thereby making disabled anthropologist a seemingly conceptual impossibility. The effect of the anthropological gaze turning towards disability introduced a “corporeal unconscious” in the discipline; the specter of becoming disabled (becoming subject to the anthropological gaze rather than being its source) haunts fieldwork and heightens the anxious relation of anthropol- ogy to disability. Illuminating the normative underpinnings of anthropology and embracing the unbearable possibility that we all might be(come) disabled should move us to collectively consider what anthropology might be otherwise.

Este artículo continúa la tradición de escribir acerca de la producción de conocimiento corporeizado para enfatizar la cuestión insuficientemente analizada de la discriminación o prejuicio contra los discapacitados, capacitismo, proveyendo una apertura para un lidiar disciplinario con legados opresivos hacia la creación de ac- ceso colectivo en antropología y la academia. Construyendo sobre la labor creativa y colaborativa de antropól- ogos discapacitados y aliados, argumento que el capacitismo es inherente a las formaciones disciplinarias de la antropología –especialmente las expectativas pertenecientes al trabajo de campo–. Realizo una serie de asevera- ciones relacionadas con este argumento: la continuación de las prácticas de trabajo de campo del modelo colonial naturaliza los cuerposmentes capaces, y sin intervención, reproduce una antropología capacitista. El antropólogo normate ha sido siempre un cuerpomente “no discapacitado”, pero una vez la discapacidad se convirtió en un objeto propio para la antropología, una línea fue solidificada entre “el antropólogo” y “el discapacitado”, haciendo de este modo al antropólogo discapacitado aparentemente una imposibilidad conceptual. El efecto de la mirada antropológica dirigiéndose hacia la discapacidad introdujo un “inconsciente corporal” en la disciplina; el espectro de llegar a ser discapacitado (llegar a estar sujeto a la mirada antropológica en vez de ser su fuente) ronda el trabajo de campo y realza la relación ansiosa de la antropología con la discapacidad. Iluminar los fundamentos normativos de la antropología y aceptar la insoportable posibilidad que todos podemos (llegar) a ser discapacitados debería movernos a considerar colectivamente lo que podría ser la antropología de otra manera.

Introduction to a special issue of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, co-edited a... more Introduction to a special issue of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, co-edited and co-authored with Erin L. Durban-Albrecht and Mario LaMothe.

This article brings together black transgender studies and postcolonial studies to consider the p... more This article brings together black transgender studies and postcolonial studies to consider the possibility for trans* narratives of Haiti, known as the " Black Republic. " Based on ethnographic research with trani, trans*, and transgender Haitians, this article focuses on how one woman— " Kelly " —has built a life between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. As the author argues, the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010, is the most prominent transition in Haitian transgender lives because of the ways that it reorganized bodies and social relations. The author draws from black, queer, trans*, and crip theories to consider how Kelly's life herstory creates possibilities for elaborating the effects of breaking open—the tectonic shifts in gender embodiment and social life that have taken place in Haiti alongside the earth's movements. More specifically, the author illustrates that antiblack postcolonial disablement of the earthquake produced transing effects. Kelly's remasculinization through sustaining injuries and receiving medical interventions resulted in the most profound dysphoria of Kelly's life. The disaster also amplified the fractures in MSM organizations because of how they paid lip service to supporting transgender women. In exploring the question of what the forms of black trans* self-authorization look like in this context of antiblack postcolonial disablement, the author proposes stitching together as a strategy geared toward black trans* futures through (imperfect) reparation and survival.

The Journal of Haitian Studies, Apr 2013

This article analyzes a public demonstration against same-sex marriage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. ... more This article analyzes a public demonstration against same-sex marriage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The author provides a thick description of this performance led by Protestant Haitians, focusing on creative displays of evangelical Christian antigay sexual politics. While the author intends to represent the demonstration in ways that are recognizable to its organizers and participants, the author comes at this project through a concern about the public performance’s effects on Haitians with same-sex desires, with whom the author has been conducting multi-sited ethnographic research since 2008. As the author contends, the demonstration was more than an enactment of “Haitian homophobia.” The author situates the contemporary conflicts and controversies about (homo)sexual politics in the context of French colonial and U.S. imperialist legacies, as performances of “postcolonial homophobia.” Postcolonial homophobia refers to the cumulative effects of historical and contemporary Western imperialist biopolitical interventions to discover, regulate, manage, control, govern, and/or liberate (homo)sexuality in postcolonial nations. Here, postcolonial homophobia is played out by two seemingly antithetical transnational social movements: evangelical Christianity and LGBTQI human rights. Debates about whether Haiti is too queer (the evangelical Christian discourse) or too homophobic (the LGBTQI rights discourse) ultimately work together to erase histories of imperialist intervention and promote American exceptionalism, which negatively impacts all Haitians.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2021

Once an important analytic tool for activist scholarship in interdisciplinary queer studies, “hom... more Once an important analytic tool for activist scholarship in interdisciplinary queer studies, “homophobia” has become a bad object for the field, critiqued for its lib- eral underpinnings and collusions with racism, capitalism, and empire. However, homophobia lingers as a peripheral analytic in certain fields, mentioned as one of the structural oppressions shaping contemporary life and death for queer people of color. Based on research about field formations in interdisciplinary queer studies as well as multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork about the gender and sexual politics of United States imperialism in Haiti where activists use omofobi (homophobia) as essential language for describing their material conditions, this article makes the case that it is politically necessary for an anti-racist and anti-imperialist inter- disciplinary queer studies to reopen a conversation about homophobia. Centering the Black Global South means rethinking the relationship of interdisciplinary queer studies to “homophobia” and creating more nuanced accounts of what I call imperialist homophobias. The ethnographically informed account here bridges critiques of homophobia as a racialized discourse of empire with description of two kinds of religious homophobia in Haiti—Catholic homophobia and Protestant homophobia—that are legacies of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism, respectively.

Books by Erin L Durban

The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti, 2022

Talks by Erin L Durban

Conference Presentations by Erin L Durban

How do we create models for ethnography from the recognition that disabled researchers and a grea... more How do we create models for ethnography from the recognition that disabled researchers and a greater diversity of bodyminds (Price 2015; Schalk 2018) are beneficial and necessary to decolonial and feminist anthropological knowledge production? I arrived at this question as a disabled activist scholar who has been contending with and writing about ableism and anthropology (with a forthcoming article in American Anthropologist) and wants to move beyond critique towards new possibilities. It made me want to experiment with accessible ethnographic research methods informed by my work in critical disability studies and the principles of disability justice—including intersectionality, sustainability, recognizing wholeness, collective access, and interdependence—articulated by the queer and trans* BIPOC disabled activists of Sins Invalid (Patricia Berne et. al 2018). The pandemic made the necessity of this work more urgent, as the whole world adjusted to living on crip time. Therefore I designed an ethnographic project that was collective (undertaken with my family members, neighbors, and students), accessible from home and on crip time, and intentionally “mixed ability.” My paper details these aspects of the project and its compatibility with patchwork ethnography as an emergent methodological and theoretical approach to ethnography.

Book Reviews by Erin L Durban

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2023

The greatest contributions of Sacrifcial Limbs to anthropology derive from Salih Can Açıksöz's fe... more The greatest contributions of Sacrifcial Limbs to anthropology derive from Salih Can Açıksöz's feminist approach to disability, militarism, the state, sovereignty, and nationalist movements in late twentieth and early twenty first century Turkey. While not announced explicitly or recognized in existing reviews, the book's feminism is apparent throughout, such as in Açıksöz's generative analysis of gender, masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, and the institution of marriage.

American Ethnologist, 2019

the world's inshore fishing is done by women, and women are often the fish sellers, the bookkeepe... more the world's inshore fishing is done by women, and women are often the fish sellers, the bookkeepers, and the processing workers who deal with the fish once landed. This focus on men also conveniently forgets that women are most often the food buyers and food preparers. These issues frame a historical study of the roles of women in Scottish and Canadian fishing communities. In 19th-century Scotland, women abandoned their role as net tenders and began baiting hooks and hauling boats, even carrying the men through the surf to their boats so the men wouldn't get their feet wet. As the fish moved along the coast, the women went with them. In these large groups of unmarried women living, working, and traveling together, women had a freedom from male control they had never before experienced. In Newfoundland, women have historically worked in the fish-processing plants and done the books for their fishermen husbands. When the great cod crisis of the 1990s came, and the cod fisheries upon which most Newfoundland communities depended were closed indefinitely, some thought to ask why no one had taken advantage of the knowledge women would have had about the size of catches and the size of the fish that were being landed. The answer lay in local culture and gender relations, where women were assumed not to be worth asking about fish.

My review of Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities ... more My review of Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities by Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little eld, 2016, 195 pp., $35.00 paper. Published by Feminist Formations.

Events Organized by Erin L Durban

The Queer and Trans* Ecologies Interdisciplinary Initiative spans the arts, humanities, social sc... more The Queer and Trans* Ecologies Interdisciplinary Initiative spans the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to explore questions in the fields of queer and trans* ecologies about new embodiments and social relations in the Anthropocene. The project was initiated with an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop Grant at the University of Minnesota, organized by Professor Erin L. Durban. We planned a dynamic, hybrid symposium on the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities campus on March 23-25, 2023.