The Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) is very pleased to announce the 2019 winners of the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for outstanding scholarship on a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic. The prize is presented each year at the American Anthropological Association’s national meeting to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective that engages theoretical perspectives relevant to LGBTQ studies.

The Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee considered a significant number of nominations this year, representing the range and depth of exceptional new work in queer anthropology. We are delighted to announce this year’s winners:

In the category of Outstanding Single­-Authored Monograph, the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize winner is Amy Brainer for Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan (Rutgers University Press 2019). An elegantly constructed ethnography written in clear, crisp, and sensitive prose, Queer Kinship and Family Change investigates kin making practices among queer and trans Taiwanese and members of their families of origin across generations. Based on 80 interviews and 18 months of participant observation, the book addresses itself to the question of how the queer projects of self making inform family of origin relations and vice versa. Brainer breaks new ground in queer anthropology by drawing structural and processual models of kinship together in a single analytic framework for queer relatedness. She opens new pathways in queer ethnography by articulating and modeling femme as research method. This is the most important book in queer kinship since Kath Weston’s Families We Choose. It is also the first monograph focusing on East Asia to be awarded the Benedict Prize since 1998 when Jennifer Robertson’s ethnography on the Takarazuka review in Japan won.

The Committee would also like to recognize B Camminga’s single-­authored monograph Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) with an Honorable Mention. This is a theoretically
sophisticated and ambitious book that brings migration studies and trans narratives of becoming together to address the question: how do sexual projects and national projects discipline and incite each other? Focusing on the experience of “gender refugees” in South Africa, Camminga explores intersections between the migration of people and concepts in order to render a historical and cultural account of “transgender.” Interweaving interviews with extensive documentary and historical evidence, this thoughtfully written monograph effectively mobilizes qualitative research to expand and enrich migration studies and trans studies.

The Ruth Benedict Book Prize will be presented to the winning authors during the AQA Business meeting which will be held from 8-9:30 PM on Thursday November 21, 2019 at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Vancouver. AQA would like to thank the Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee for their work, including former Benedict Prize winners Eric Plemons, Elisabeth Engebretsen, and Lucinda Ramberg and Graduate Student Representative Annie Wilkinson. For additional information, please contact the Committee Chair, Lucinda Ramberg, at ler35@cornell.edu.