Queer as Shifter: Intertwining Linguistic and Queer Anthropological Approaches

Abstract (English)

Through a theoretical and affective engagement with queer, feminist, decolonial and linguistic anthropology, this paper explores the potential of using the semiotic analytic of shifter (Jakobson 1984, Silverstein 1976) to approach the orientations and imperatives of queer anthropology and its concern with counter hegemonic knowledge production, anti-normative embodiment, desire, and subjectivity, and quest for elsewheres and otherwises (Weiss 2022, Mikdashi & Puar 2016, Muñoz 2009). In treating queer anthropology as a shifter, we can perhaps more thoroughly address its unending and im/proper subjects (Weiss 2022), its animating ambiguity and expansiveness, while directly incorporating valuable linguistic anthropological interventions on ideology (Gal and Irvine 2000, 2022), materiality (Cavanaugh & Shankar 2017), interaction, signification, and circulation (to name a few). Drawing from the various aforementioned scholars and centering particularly on the contributions of Queer of Color, Trans of Color and Black Feminist scholars, as well as examples from preliminary (digital and in-person) fieldwork online Guatemalan queer expression, subjectivity, resistance and activism, I hope to put the fields of queer anthropology and linguistic anthropology more closely in conversation, in hopes of yielding a critical perspective capable of doing justice to the vast multivalent, grounded yet dynamic ways we go about understanding humans, their techniques of world/self-making and solidarity.