The Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) is pleased to announce the 2025 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 2025 Ruth Benedict Prize to Tamar R. Shirinian for Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in Armenia, Shrinian’s analysis centers around two perverse figures that are seen to threaten the Armenian nation–the homosexual and the oligarch. Shirinian’s work develops a queer theory of political economy through a rare synthesis of psychoanalysis, the nation-state, and queer anthropology. This work shows how survival acquires multiple and layered meanings and the queer possibilities that might lie ahead if the nation does not survive. Survival of a Perverse Nation is gorgeously written, brilliantly conceptualized, and has the potential to speak to scholars and other readers who are trying to understand issues of nationalism, the family, and the figures that are seen to threaten them (like queers and feminists) throughout the world.

The prize committee also recognizes Justin Perez with an honorable mention for Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru. Queer Emergent is a lively and engaging ethnography of queer and trans communities in urban Amazonian Peru who were the target of global HIV prevention efforts. Perez focuses on scandalous storytelling to think about how communities are both impacted by and speak back to global HIV prevention interventions, larger political transformations, and local experiences of stigma and discrimination.  Perez’s deep attention to stories of his interlocutors from the nightclub to the soccer field to the hair salon reveal insights that challenge some of the key assumptions of global health experts.

AQA would like to thank the Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee for their work, including former Ruth Benedict Prize winner Asli Zengin and Graduate Student Representative Syed Taha Kaleem. For additional information, please contact the Committee Chair, Sarah Luna, at sarah.luna@tufts.edu.