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.

Congratulations to Themal Ellawala, our 2022 Payne Prize Awardee. Themal is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They are awarded for the paper entitled: The Erotics of Violence: Imagining Alternative Possibilities to/of Queerphobia.

Link to winning manuscript: 2022 Winner Kenneth Payne Prize_Ellawala

As an overview of this year’s competition, ten papers were submitted. 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. In 2022, the AQA Kenneth W. Payne Prize Committee roster was: Brooke Bocast (Montana State University), John Song Pae Cho (University of British Columbia), Anahi Russo Garrido (Metropolitan State University of Denver), Timothy Gitzen (Wake Forest University), Michael Connors Jackman (Universität Wien), Michelle Marzullo [Chair] (California Institute of Integral Studies), and Zhiqiu Benson Zhou (University of Pennsylvania).