“The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious’: Black Feminist Habits of Mind, and the Object (and Ends) of Ethnography.”
The larger work out of which this short intervention emerges—There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life-- inaugurates a form that builds upon the Black feminist imperative to produce purposefully embodied narrative theory, the queer mandate to resist or subvert normativity, and the ethnographic warrant to poetically represent lived reality. Here, we meditate on the “discipline” Marlon Riggs and other Black gay men, lesbians, trans, and bisexual cultural workers and intellectuals were engaged in, that he named “anthropology… the unending search for what is utterly precious” -- proposing some frameworks for ethnographic work drawn from this Black gay tradition of the long 1980s.