The Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for outstanding scholarship on a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic. The prize is presented each year to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective that engages theoretical perspectives relevant to LGBTQ studies. The Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee considered a significant number of nominations this year, representing the range and depth of exceptional new work in queer anthropology. We are delighted to announce this year’s winners.
In the category of Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph, the committee is pleased to present the 2024 Ruth Benedict Prize to Asli Zengin for Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World. Zengin has given us a beautiful book that braids the pleasures, grief, dreams, and fears of trans and queer individuals in Turkey. Presenting an in-depth analysis of what it means to be trans in a world caught between neo-liberalism and Islamic revivalism, the book gently revisits some of the foundational concepts and debates of queer theory and anthropology and surprises readers with startling new readings. Zengin tells the reader about the lives of trans individuals, who navigate the complexities of urbanism and the subsequent violence they face and elicits the range of emotions and affects that accumulate in queer lives that survive. Violent Intimacies is at the same time a study of grief and mourning for lives lost, of hope and dreams for a better world, of trans rage and joy.
The prize committee also recognizes Naisargi Dave’s Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being with an honourable mention. Dave, a previous winner, continues to expand the horizons of queer anthropology through original and innovative sites for critique and scholarship. Indifference is a spellbinding book from start to finish, the provocations linger with the reader and its questions continue to unfold long after turning the last page. Conceptually sharp, surprising, and astutely imagined; the writing is crisp, witty, and engaging. A beautiful instruction in how ethnography is praxis and genre that is intersectional, the book makes an original contribution beyond disciplines and subfields. Indifference is a spectacular ethnographic worldmaking that leaves the reader in awe.
AQA would like to thank the Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee for their work, including former Ruth Benedict Prize winners Omar Kasmani, Joseph Russo, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Graduate Student Representative Syed Taha Kaleem. For additional information, please contact the Committee Chair, Vaibhav Saria at vsaria@sfu.ca