The Distinguished Achievement Award, begun in 2018,  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. This year’s Distinguished Achievement Award will be given to Professor Kath Weston, who will be honored at the AQA Business Meeting, taking place virtually during the AAAs in Seattle, WA.

Professor Weston has been a pioneer in the field of queer anthropology—conducting pathbreaking research on U.S. lesbian and gay communities, queer transformations of kinship, and queer urban studies. Her 1993 annual review article “Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology,” is considered a field-defining essay. Weston’s distinguished career in queer anthropology includes five books—The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (co-editor, 1985); Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, and Kinship (1991, 2nd ed. 1997), Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins (1996), Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (1998) and Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (2002).  She has received numerous honors and awards, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the British Academy, and the Guggenheim Foundation Families We Choose, a classic in the field, won an AQA Ruth Benedict Prize for outstanding monograph. Weston won the Benedict Prize a second time for her book Render Me, Gender Me. Weston’s current work focuses on embodiment and visceral engagement, integrating material from kinship studies, social studies of finance, political ecology, and science and technology studies. And she has published additional books: Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor (2007) and Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (2017). Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and holds a British Academy Global Professorship in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh through 2023.