We are pleased to announce the recipients of AQA’s annual awards and prizes for 2023.
The honorees will be recognized at the AQA Business Meeting, on Friday, November 17, from 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EST, in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Room 713A.
• The Ruth Benedict Prize is presented each year at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic. Submissions may be on any topic related to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, or other gender / sexual formations and categories from any world culture area. Authors may represent any scholarly discipline, but the material submitted must engage anthropological theories and methods. The nominations this year were of exceptionally high caliber in both their theoretical contributions and the beauty of the writing.
In the category of Outstanding Single¬-Authored Monograph, the 2023 Ruth Benedict Prize winner is Omar Kasmani, guest lecturer at the Freie Universität, Berlin, for Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke, 2022). This book is gripping from the first page to the last, and, for the committee, unlike anything we have read before. Queer Companions intimately explores the affective bonds between people and saints. Those bonds, in turn, open different kinds of portals: to think through religious affects, through ways that people express their relations to the divine; to engage forms of “unstraightness” that emerge in Muslim mysticism historically and today; to analyze the public architecture of intimacy; and to reimagine the possibilities of “queer” and queer world-making. Our guides on this journey are ascetics, known as fakirs, living an “otherwise life” through devotion to the saint Laʿl Shahbaz Qalandar at an historic site of pilgrimage in Sehwan, Pakistan. The fieldwork unfolds across mundane, material, and spiritual realms, inclusive of people, saints, fairies, demons, and other inhabitants of fakirs’ lifeworlds. Kasmani expresses a desire to neither queer Islamic studies nor Islamicize queer, and the book delivers on this desire, providing a new framework of intimacy and companionship between queer studies and Islamic studies. This is a book whose effects will ripple through multiple fields of study for years to come.
The 2023 Ruth Benedict honorable mention is awarded to Joseph Russo, Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, for Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke, 2023). This is a book you will be unable to read just once. Hard Luck pulls its readers to visit and revisit the places, characters, and stories that comprise the social ecology of Southeast Texas. “Why do you want to do research there, on such people?” the author is asked, of an ethnography that takes us from an RV park to a health food store to a cancer clinic to a casino, along stretches of highway dotted with church signs, under the shadow of the petrochemical industry. Along the way, Russo describes, in lush detail, the necropastoral landscape and the ways that it registers in the bodies of the people who live there. Rather than starting with queer stories and situating them in a culture, Hard Luck starts with a culture from which particular kinds of stories and characters emerge. Russo identifies the hard luck story as a genre of Texas storytelling and queer epiphanies as a subgenre. Bonds between queer people form around a shared wound, a shared debility and sense of stuckness that is characteristic of the hard luck story. In these and other ways, queer people, like the other characters in this book, are a part of the ecology Russo describes; this is a queerness not just in a place but of a place. The book forges new paths in the study of rural queer life under the ecological conditions of late capitalism.
The Benedict Prize Committee comprised Vaibhav Saria and Dominic Bocci, chaired by Amy Brainerd.
• The Kenneth W. Payne Student Prize is presented each year by the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) 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. The Prize includes a cash award in the amount of $500. Submissions are encouraged from graduate or undergraduate students in any of the four fields of anthropology. To be eligible for consideration, work should have been completed since June 2022 and while the applicant was still enrolled as a student.
The Payne Prize Committee has awarded our 2023 prize to the paper:
“The Tale of a Suffocated Fish: Heteronormativity, Islamic Exegesis, and the Impossibility of Queer Possibilities” Febi R. Ramadhan, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Members of the 2023 Payne Prize Committee included: 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 (New York University Shanghai).
• The AQA Travel Award went to Hatim Rachdi, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, class of 2023
• The Distinguished Achievement Award will be presented to William Leap, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the American University and Affiliate Professor in the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University.
Professor Leap has been a founding figure in the field of queer linguistic anthropology, conducting vital research on gay and LGBTQ language amid the AIDS epidemic. His 1995 edited volume Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Representation and Imagination in Lesbian and Gay Discourse. Newark NJ: Gordon and Breach Publishers, is considered a field defining book in queer linguistic anthropology. Leap’s distinguished career in queer anthropology includes three monographs— American Indian English (1993), Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (1996), Language Before Stonewall (2020) and eight edited and co-edited volumes. He has received numerous honors and awards including grants from the European Union and the Ford Foundation. Leap has won the distinguished AQA Ruth Benedict Award a remarkable four times for Out in the Field: Lesbian and Gay Reflections (co-edited with fellow Distinguished Achievement Award winner Ellen Lewin, 1996), Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (1996), Out in Theory: The emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology (co-editor, 2002), Out in Public: Lesbian and Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World (co-editor, 2009). His current work focuses on queer and trans languages.