A queer footnote

Abstract

AbstractAnthropological accounts of sexual and gendered difference often serve the role of footnotes that buttress and even expand the reach of Euro‐American concepts. In contrast to this contained role for anthropology, queer footnotes can push the discipline toward more capacious and experimental engagements with powerful knowledge. In 2020, governments around the world introduced lockdowns and border‐control measures in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This was the case in Australia, where I undertook fieldwork with trans‐ and queer Indonesians living in Melbourne. In Australia, COVID‐19 public health measures paralleled and exacerbated migration restrictions on people living with HIV and the criminalization of sex work. Asian, queer, trans‐, and sex worker bodies were addressed as a moral and physiological contagion. Queer anthropology is good for maintaining a critical ethnographic focus on how the state governs through a racial biopolitics of containment, and generates concepts for public health that shift the focus from security to care.