Abstract
Focusing on unlikely field sites and life’s flotsam, such as a cramped apartment, an urban alley, a pile of clothes, dust motes, face masks, stale air, and trash, this work limns the pivotal value of the visceral, the fleeting, the contingent, the small, and the infra-ordinary to possibly nurture a particular “worlding” of queer anthropology in the early twenty-first century. Taking a motley crew of inspirational productions and encounters, including affective experimental texts, trashy makeover television shows, everyday encounters, professional intrigues, and banal boredom, this essay pulls out from diary pages of seemingly incoherent scribblings some vital moments of world-(un)making, living, detachments, attachments, carings, refusals, and disaffections. This essay offers an embodied sense of queerness as a refuge, a refusal, a placeless nowhere-ishness, a hopeful elsewhere-ishness—all constituting a queerness that is tacitly embedded in the uncertainty and precarity of the times.