Abstract
This chapter considers the impact of queer theory on queer anthropology, of queer anthropology on queer theory, and of the insights of queer empiricism on queer studies as a whole—a genealogy too often sidelined or erased. The chapter considers three signal moments: queer studies’ transnational turn, Gayle Rubin’s "Thinking Sex," and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. This genealogy highlights anthropology’s queer empiricism as counter to the too-ready dismissal of anthropology as mere data—cross-cultural context for queer study’s abstract concepts ("theory") in the form of exoticized and colonialist case studies. Attending to multidisciplinary conversations and highlighting multiple genealogies, I argue for a reading of theory as situated, extrinsic, partial—queer theories, not theory.