Departures: Reworlding Queer Anthropology

This roundtable of Black queer anthropologists, featuring Lyndon Gill, Marshall Green, Nikki Lane, and Kwame Otu in conversation with Shaka McGlotten, is oriented around several themes: ethnography, art, and activism; the abolitionist potentials in their coming together; the dislocation of Black queer anthropologists in the academy and the discipline; the complex sociality of ethnographic practice, relationality, and community accountability; and the need for another/Black queer non-university, spaces for study, and the recharging of resiliencies.

This chapter explores one potential new direction—trans vitalities—that queer and trans anthropological inquiry might take toward meaningfully addressing inequities within and across trans communities of practice. Trans vitalities is a model that requires the researcher deprioritize their own interests or evaluations by asking and identifying (1) how “queer” and “LGBT” frameworks work to erase trans lived experiences; (2) what meaningful or quality life trans lived experience is assumed to look like; and (3) why frameworks like trans vitalities are needed to offer necessarily messy toolkits toward addressing the necessarily messy features of life.