Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of Queer Passage in Anthropology

Being Single in India: Gendered Identities, Class Mobilities, and Personhoods in Flux

“…Single women have gained little attention in scholarship on India, and in fact anthropologists and sociologists studying gender have emphasized—rightly so, to a significant extent—the crucial importance of marriage for Indian women, often giving the impression that never‐married women barely exist and that life outside of marriage for a woman in India is unthinkable. Susan Seizer, for instance, reflects on how—although in India's large economic centers of Bombay and Delhi she found some lesbian women leading “new‐fangled lives” as single women—in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu where she conducted most of her fieldwork “single, independent women are almost unheard of; the prospect of survival—loose from the net of kinship relations that are the basis of social and economic stability—is daunting, and to pursue such an uncharted course seems both foolish and suspect” (, 98). Linda Stone and Caroline James comment in a similar vein on “one clear fact of Indian life: the unacceptability of the unmarried adult woman” (, 130).…”

Value eruptions and modalities: White male rage in the ′80s and ′90s

“…What it treats is a complex of forces, a 'sex-money-power nexus' as Seitzer (1995) has described it. This nexus operates at the center of contemporary white male angst and rage against the state.…”

“…In an account of her ethnographic work in Indian villages, Susan Seitzer (1995), an anthropologist with a same-sex partner, describes a situation in which she and her partner's lesbian identities risked disintegration in a place that had no language or social position for women with female partners. The story takes various twists and turns as Seitzer and her partner, Kate, seek to establish a modus vivendi that will allow their relationship to persist while allowing Seitzer to retain the rapport necessary to accomplish her field work.…”

“May I talk to you?” ethno-sexual encounters in Taipei’s New Park—A queer ethnography

“…Esther Newton (1993); Susan Seizer (1995). mostly in the form of notes, it occurred to me that the questions asked of me by the curious men in the park could themselves be considered as anthropological inquiries.…”