Suchergebnisse

Drawing on work with a Malawian LGBTI-rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), this article's entry point is the "fake gay," a person who, according to state political discourse and news media, allegedly fakes a marginalized sexual identity to gain access to foreign resources channeled through NGOs. For LGBTI-identified persons in the NGO's orbit, meanwhile, fake gays—infiltrating inauthentic gays—breed fear and resentment amid circuits of scarce resource distribution and homophobia. This mythologized figure, rooted in racialized arbitrations of fake or real, sincere or cunning, reveals NGOs, dismissed in critical scholarship as "unqueer"—for spreading homonationalism, sapping radical agendas by institutionalizing liberal human rights frameworks, and smuggling in Euro-American logics of sexual modernity—to be unlikely sites of queer complexity. Reading NGO spaces as customary forms and drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic vignettes, the author shows how ritualized practices associated with audit culture in aid economies (monitoring and evaluation, paperwork, counting) operate as queer sites of multiplying possibilities and emergences. Rather than expose faking as duplicity or insincerity, the author argues that faking and normalizing practices rooted in logics of standardization, quantification, and replicability are co-constitutive. In addition to proposing the fake gay as a mode of theory that draws attention to (queer) world-making practices within postcolonial aid geographies, this article broadens understandings of the (queer) customary beyond narrowly defined cultural practices such as customs, rituals, and traditions.

Anthropology has long grappled with the politics of critique. In critical global health studies, an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, ethnographers negotiate relations and transactions in the field that pivot around boundaries at the core of our disciplinary practice: inside/outside, critique/complicity, theoretical/applied. Yet, while critique is a primary endeavor of the anthropologist, few have explicitly analyzed or reflected on its meanings, valences, affects, and entailments, particularly amid the rise of global health and the NGOization of the global South that inflects much of our work. In this essay, I reflect on the state of critique in critical global health studies, sketching its gestures, rhetoric, and intentions. Then, I trace some of the journeys of the bar of soap pictured below, an object that touched me in many senses of the term by intersecting, facilitating, and holding my anthropological interest for over a decade. Finally, drawing on recent feminist science studies scholarship, I suggest that critique, as entangled and entangling practice, is a form of care that might productively reframe anthropologists' normative aspirations to 'usefulness' or 'relevance'.