The Association of Queer Anthropology (AQA) is delighted to announce that Evelyn Blackwood and Gayle Rubin have each received AQA’s Distinguished Achievement Award for the years 2020 and 2021. The Distinguished Achievement Award honors outstanding contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer anthropology through scholarship, research, teaching, mentoring, service, public engagement, and/or activism. The award seeks to honor our elders, recognize lifetime career achievements, and build community by connecting generations of AQA scholars. Past recipients of the award include Esther Newton (2018), Elizabeth Kennedy (2018), and Ellen Lewin (2019).
AQA originally intended to invite Professor Blackwood and Professor Rubin to the AAA 2020 meetings in St. Louis to accept their awards in person. Due to the AAA meetings being cancelled, we decided to extend the award to 2021, when we hope that both recipients can accept their awards in person at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Baltimore in November 2021. In the interim, we have shot short videos where Blackwood and Rubin reflect on their careers and their time in the Anthropology Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH) and the Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA), antecedents to AQA.
Evelyn Blackwood has a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, and is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of six books, three of which have won AQA’s Ruth Benedict Prize. Along with Saskia Wieringa, she is the co-editor of the 1999 Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures from Columbia University Press. Co-edited with Saskia E. Wieringa. Evelyn is also the co-editor of Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. Co-edited with Saskia Wieringa, Abha Bhaiya. And she is also the author of the 2007 monograph Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia from the University of Hawaii Press. As a master student, Blackwood was the first female co-chair of then-called Anthropology Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH).
Gayle Rubin has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, where she is also currently Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Women’s and Gender Studies. Gayle has written foundational texts in feminist and queer anthropology. Her two landmark essays, 1975’s “The Traffic in Women” and 1984’s “Thinking Sex,” transformed the way that a generation considered gender and sexuality. Her book of collected essays, Deviations, published by Duke University Press in 2011 is the winner of AQA’s Ruth Benedict Prize in Queer Anthropology. In 2000 Rubin received the National Leather Association Lifetime Achievement Award and was selected by the Leather Archives & Museum as a “Centurion” — one of twenty in the 20th century recognized for outstanding contributions to Leather.
Thank you AQA for instituting these Distinguished Achievement Awards (one of which I was fortunate enough to receive), and for keeping them going during this incredibly difficult time in such a creative (virtual) way. Both Evie Blackwood and Gayle Rubin are so deserving, and both their talks so instructive and important for future generations. History is never dead. It is not even past.
Happily, Alice Echols alerted me to this virtual session. As Evie mentioned, I became “president” of AROH in 1981, at my very first ARGOH meeting [I am not an anthropologist but was at AAA because of my involvement with the Visual Anthropology crowd], largely because I was one of the few [maybe only] tenured faculty member there. I agreed to take on the role on the condition that we enlisted a female co-chair, and Evie — as she said, the only woman present — agreed to serve. My contributions to ARGOH mainly consisted of organizing a prominent session at the next year’s AAA meetings, and recruiting Esther Newton to take on a leadership role in ARGOH. Later on, as co-editor of Columbia U Press’s LGBT book series, I was happy to be able to publish quite a few books by ARGOH/SOLGA/AQA members. It’s a treat to see and hear Evie and Gayle!
FYI: There’s an issue of the ARGOH Newsletter that Gayle discussed online that covers some of this history:
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/sol.1981.3.4.1
Thanks for the history reminder, Larry! And thanks for posting the link. I am excited to hear that the ARGH Newsletter is available through AnthroSource.