The Kenneth W. Payne Student Prize is presented each year by the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) of the American Anthropological Association to a graduate or undergraduate student in acknowledgment of outstanding anthropological work on 1) a lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans* topic, or 2) a critical interrogation of sexualities and genders more broadly defined.

Twenty-one students submitted entries this year, including twenty papers and one ethnographic film. Submissions were evaluated according to the following criteria: use of relevant L/G/B/T/Q and/or feminist anthropological theory and literature, potential for contribution to and advancement of L/G/B/T/Q studies and our understanding of sexualities worldwide, attention to difference (such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation), originality, organization and coherence, and timeliness.

The 2020 recipient of the Payne Prize:

Alex Krantzler (University of California Los Angeles), for the paper “‘Speak Like You Don’t Know Hebrew’: Cultivating Queer Registers in Contemporary Israel.”

The abstract reads as follows:

Queer Israeli communities struggle to reconcile their identities within the constraints of the Hebrew language, which (in both its Biblical and Modern incarnations) has a rigid, binary grammatical gender structure. In response to the requirements of Modern Hebrew, these communities are evolving new ways of speaking to create a sense of belonging and assert their identities within this language that obligatorily marks gender across varied social situations. Moreover, their linguistic choices are a form of everyday activism—a process of agency and resistance against the hegemonic structure of Hebrew and the patriarchal ideologies that shape the language.

Data for this linguistic anthropological study were collected in Tel Aviv, Israel through participant observation, open-ended interviews with twenty-five individual LGBTQ-identified, bi-/multilingual Hebrew-speaking participants, and fifteen responses to an anonymous online survey. Utilizing the frameworks of the establishment of community through language, power and agency in identity performance, and the relationship between language and identity—as well as underlying ideologies about and affordances of multilingualism—this study critically analyzes in order to document strategies for “queering” the Hebrew language in practice and provides a greater level of insight into this wave of everyday activism across the LGBTQ+ community in contemporary Israel.

The committee is also pleased to award two honorable mentions, to Elspeth Davies (University of Cambridge, UK) for the paper “Gender Blind: A Multisensory Account of Gender in the UK” and to Zhiqiu Benson Zhou (Northwestern University) for the paper “The Myth of ‘More 0s than 1s’: Masculine Obsession and Anxiety in Chinese Gay Communities.”

The 2020 Payne Prize recipients will be recognized at a to-be-determined event as part of “Raising our Voices.”

Members of the 2020 Payne Prize Committee: Brooke Bocast (Montana State University), Nathan Dawthorne (University of Western Ontario), Timothy McCajor Hall (UCLA), Michael Connors Jackman (Universität Wien), Richard Martin [outgoing co-chair] (Harvard University), Michelle Marzullo [incoming co-chair] (California Institute of Integral Studies), and Vaibhav Saria (Simon Fraser University).

For additional information, contact the Payne committee outgoing co-chair, Richard Martin rmartin01@fas.harvard.edu